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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE OLD FAITH IN THE NEW^DAY 



The 
Contemporary Christ 



BY 

JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1921, by 
JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 



OCT 26 1921 



Printed in the United States of America 



©CLAS24994 

-WO J 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 7 

I. The Contemporary Christ 9 

II. "The Best Portion of a Good Man's Life" 33 

HE. The Clue to Experience 61 

IV. The Vision That Sustains 91 

V. The God of Things as They Are 123 

VI. Life and the Enduring Love 157 

Vli. The Incalculable Element in Christianity 191 

VIII. Pursuit and Knowledge 221 

IX. The Christian Overplus 249 

X. The Impregnable Tradition 283 



PREFACE 

It is perhaps not amiss to say that while 
some of the sermons in the present volume 
have been delivered before special conferences 
of ministers, all of them have been preached 
in the ordinary pulpit ministry of recent months, 
and are reproduced in practically the same form 
as that in which they were orally given. They 
were neither prepared nor preached in series, 
yet there runs through them all a continuity 
of thought and feeling which would seem to 
warrant their association under the title by 
which they are introduced. May their witness 
be not unfruitful to Him for whom they at- 
tempt to speak! 

J. M. M. G. 



I 

THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 



After that he appeared in another form unto 
two of them, as they walked, and went into the 
country. — Mark 16. 12. 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 



I do not debate the resurrection now. I am 
content to say simply that if Jesus did not rise 
from the dead, all history since his day is in- 
comprehensible. Subject these documents to 
the severest scrutiny of unrelenting criticism, 
and they come to this: that either Jesus rose 
from the dead or his disciples lied. They 
could not have been innocently mistaken. But 
then you face the fact that you could not get 
the life the disciples lived from either a lie or 
a liar. 

"He appeared ... to two of them." But they 
are not named. If Mark or Peter, whose Gos- 
pel Mark wrote down for him, knew these two, 
neither of them thought their names important 
enough to be introduced. Saint Luke, writing 
some fifteen years later, with ample time, and 
the spirit for the acquisition of details, gives 
the name of one of them as Cleopas, but even 
then all we have is the name; we know nothing 
of the disciple, while not even Luke gives us 
the name of the other. This appearance is 
told, not because it happened to two disciples, 
but because it happened to Christ. But it 

ll 



12 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

is a very gracious appearance for all of that. 
The other appearances recorded in the Gospels, 
to Mary and to Peter and to the apostles and 
to Paul, seem too remote from us. They were 
revelations made to chosen souls; and our com- 
moner, more nameless life finds little, if any, 
fellowship in them. This appearance is to men 
so obscure that only one of them is so much as 
named, while of him we know nothing else. 
This is a revelation for all the rest of us com- 
mon folks who walk in many fashions our ob- 
scurer way of life. 

And the very soul of this narrative and the 
heart of its message is that he appeared "in 
another form." So they did not recognize 
him. Christ was there and they did not know 
it. They were mourning his death while he 
walked beside them. They were recounting 
their shattered hopes when the fulfillment of 
them was at hand. It is written here that they 
communed and questioned together. They re- 
membered and inquired. They remembered 
Christ and inquired about him. It was debate 
and speculation, argument and skepticism. 
"And it came to pass, while they communed 
and questioned together, that Jesus himself 
drew near, and went with them." And they did 
not know it. 

The reason, of course, is in the very phrase: 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 13 

He appeared in another form, which means that 
he had appeared before; and the form of his 
former appearance blinded them to the fact 
of his immediate presence. They had known 
him in the common, simple incidents of daily 
life. They had seen him as a man upon the 
dusty roads they traveled. They had looked 
upon him in the homely circles of the fireside 
and table. They had watched him in the won- 
derful but humane and tender ministries to 
the sick and stricken. They had seen him 
weeping by the tomb of Lazarus and were fa- 
miliar with the spectacular and dramatic busi- 
ness of Lazarus coming back to life. He had 
been superhuman, but he had been human, too; 
and the superhuman was so mixed and mingled 
with the human that while they thought it 
was he that should deliver Israel, the memories 
of his own bondage to the ills and incidents of 
life, his hunger and thirst and weariness, were 
too keen to let their comprehension pass the 
gates of tragedy. For they had seen him before 
certain undeniable events had happened. It 
is not simply that "he appeared in another 
form unto two of them," but "After that he 
appeared in another form." After what? After 
the betrayal and capture; after the trial and 
crucifixion; after the burial. After all that, he had 
appeared in another form, and because of that 



14 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

they did not recognize him. Sheer and sharp 
between them and their former knowledge of 
him had fallen certain uncompromising reali- 
ties. We speak of the difference the crucifixion 
made in Jesus; but without irreverence, was 
there not almost as much a difference made in 
the disciples? One of the most frequently 
noted effects of the recent war was the extraor- 
dinary change made in the character and spirit 
of the men. They went into battle and march 
and campaign volatile, exuberant, careless; and 
they came from the trenches not only worn in 
body and shaken in nerves, but sobered, solemn- 
ized, aged by the mighty tragedy of great events. 
It is said that early in his career Napoleon ap- 
plied to the French Department of War for an 
important command, and was told by the min- 
ister of war that "Napoleon is too young to 
command an army as general-in-chief." Napo- 
leon's answer was, "One soon becomes old on 
the battlefield, and I come from it." It is not on 
battlefields alone that one becomes prematurely 
old. Was it not Charles Lamb who said, "Our 
spirits show gray before our hairs"? Whether 
they realized it or not, how gray the crucifixion 
must have made the disciples' spirits! If there 
was a change in the form of Christ when that 
stupendous tragedy was done, what must have 
been the change also in the very life of those 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 15 

on whom it came with the crash of a bewildering 
despair! This Christ was not the Jesus whom 
they had known in those homely, glorious days 
of human fellowship before; and they were not 
the same unquestioning and unsophisticated 
peasant folks that had followed him with bland 
and blazing hopes. They had been sobered, 
solemnized, aged by what they had seen and 
known. The clash of contradictory events, the 
pitiless disappointment of what had been their 
simple faith, had brought them uncertainty, 
skepticism, doubt, and an intimate and per- 
sonal bewilderment. Their life wrenched by 
these revolutionary experiences from its old 
and limited outlook, they had lost the form of 
Jesus with which they had been familiar and 
now that he appeared in another form they did 
not recognize him. 

Is that not the experience of men and women 
to-day? One of the persistent problems of 
religion is why many men and women of the 
finest attitude toward life and the most rever- 
ent desire for truth, both of knowledge and 
experience, find themselves outside the Chris- 
tian faith while honestly wishing they were in 
it. And oftentimes the heart of the problem 
is in the fact that once they were in it; that 
once they were disciples of a Christ whose 
reality they did not question and whose form 



16 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

was certain. Somewhere between that older 
day and their present time something happened 
which changed the very fiber of their life and 
swept away the form and appearance of the 
Christ they once had known. 

It is that very diverse but very modern 
mood which speaks to us in this text, "He ap- 
peared in another form." That means, as I 
have already said, that he had appeared before. 
Some of us can trace our own spiritual history 
here. He appeared to us when we were children 
as a very real though mysterious Person. He 
was God and man all in one. He was all- 
powerfuL He could answer our prayers. He 
could give us what we wanted — a fair day, a 
good time, a new toy. Oh, you know the faith 
of a child! — full of wonder and credulity, but 
very real for all of that. And something hap- 
pened. We grew older. We came to see that 
our childish sort of belief would not do. And 
there are men and women in every congrega- 
tion who have found no other belief to put in 
its place, and their lives are a great wistfulness 
and shadow. 

Or, Christ appeared to us before as the ex- 
pression of a certain protecting and personal 
providence. We read that here he healed the 
sick. We read that here he stilled the storm 
upon a sea. We read that here he fed the mul- 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 17 

titudes with miraculously supplied provisions. 
We read that here he walked upon the sea to 
the disciples as they toiled amid the night and 
storm. And then something happened. Some 
storm of trouble broke on us and our prayers 
for sudden peace were never answered. Some 
appealing threat of sorrow loomed before us, 
and for all our supplication death was not 
delayed, and, whatever happened to Lazarus, 
our loved ones are dead forever. Some tragic 
monotony of toil without vision and labor with- 
out gain dragged over us and in our breaking 
struggle there came no help. We had thought 
it was he that should deliver not only Israel 
but us; and we have been undelivered; and the 
miraculous, beneficent, providential Christ that 
we knew is gone. 

Or the Christ we knew was not only the in- 
dubitable figure of a mighty past; he was the 
center of a revelation direct from God and 
gathered into a book whose singular and excep- 
tional character made it the very word of God 
to men. He was so strangely divine a Being 
that the very pages which described him were 
written by the direct and immediate urgency of 
God himself. No question, criticism, dissent 
from any of it were possible because it was all 
of a piece, inspired of the living and omniscient 
God, and the very vocabulary in which the 



18 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

record was preserved was a vocabulary selected 
by the unerring precision of the Almighty. That 
was the Christ we knew, immeasurable, im- 
measurably remote, exalted, preserved within 
the sacred spaces of a revelation like to which 
the world had seen no other, and to which no 
addition would be made in all the length of 
time. Then something happened. We went to 
college; or we read the wider and more scientific 
literature of our day. We came to see the ap- 
parently inexorable law of development working 
in the realm of religious history as well as else- 
where. We began to see that the scientific test of 
the Bible was not whether it was inspired, but 
whether it was true, and that its truth could not 
be settled by throwing over it the glamour of a 
mighty word. The whole modern critical ad- 
vance upon the Bible, the application of the his- 
torical method to its study, the spectacle of 
the New Testament miracles in the light of 
scientific declarations — all of that went over us 
in college classrooms or in the quiet of our most 
intense and intimate reading; and the Christ 
of an inspired record was gone. Some of us, 
like these two on the way to Emmaus, have 
walked sadly ever since. Some have steeled 
our souls to an insolent intolerance of everything 
that would relate to the old faith. Some of us 
have seriously set our lives to generous and 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 19 

social good, thinking to make up for the lost 
religion by the conduct of a new brotherhood. 
And this is not simply an experience of men 
and women who either honestly or insolently 
refuse to be called Christian; it is many a 
time the experience of Christian men and wom- 
en as well. The satisfaction they once had is 
gone. The certainty they once felt has passed. 
They want to be Christian, and they claim to 
be Christian, and they compel themselves to 
believe where they cannot see, but the old glad 
and appealing enjoyment of religion has per- 
ished. Christ seems strangely faded; and the 
services of the church and the witness of the 
New Testament seem to testify a far-off and 
finished but not-to-be-recalled experience. 

"Where is the blessedness I knew, 
When first I saw the Lord? 
Where is the soul-refreshing view 
Of Jesus and his word?" 

Even Luther confessed, "At times I believe 
and at times I doubt." Hugh Latimer wrote 
to his friend and fellow martyr Ridley: "Pardon 
me and pray for me; pray for me, I say. For I 
am sometimes so fearful that I would creep 
into a mouse-hole; sometimes God doth visit 
me again with his comfort. So he cometh and 
goeth." 
Now, it cannot be that God really comes and 



20 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

goes; with him there is no variableness, neither 
shadow that is cast by turning. It is Latimer's 
power of recognizing him that varies. Luther 
sometimes believes and sometimes doubts; but 
the object of his belief must remain unchanged. 
It is Luther's sight of it that trembles. It is 
unthinkable that Christ should get away. He 
is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. The 
Christ of childhood, strange, mystic, marvelous, 
but very real, is the Christ of age, divine, but 
human and historic. The Christ of miracle, 
of providence, of personal interest, is the Christ 
of scholarship, subject to laws of nature and 
life; the central figure of a literary record writ- 
ten by men^s toiling hands and discriminated 
by their minds; the inaugurator of a social move- 
ment as well as a religious revolution. And the 
clue to these vast and confusing differences is 
in the fact with which the text of this sermon 
is concerned: "He appeared in another form." 

II 

In another form, but the same Christ! In 
other words, whatever may be the change in 
your religious life and thought produced by 
your age, your experiences, your education; 
whatever may be your feeling that the Christ 
you used to know is gone, you have not really 
lost Christ; you have only lost sight of him. 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 21 

He has the same presence but not the same 4 
proof of it. It is not a difference in identity 
but of identification. You have the same fact 
but not in the same fashion. You do not have 
to recover an old appearance; you have to 
recognize a new aspect. And it is this changing 
aspect of things which, in religion, is so bewil- 
dering, but which in everything else is so 
natural and clear. 

You cannot think of nature now as you 
thought of it when you were a child. When 
we become men we put away childish things. 
Then there was a wonder and a witchery about 
the deeps of sky and drifting cloud, which we 
long since have lost. A storm, a sight of the 
ocean, a lamp-post at night — anything and all 
things had a wonderment and interest and 
familiar mystery to us as children which they 
do not have now. But they remain the same. 
You have gone back to your old home, some of 
you, with high hopes and the tenderest of sen- 
timents and a curious anticipatory awe — and 
have been terribly disappointed. The streets 
which you remembered as so wide and long 
were narrow straggling roads; the house which 
had seemed palatial in your childhood was 
quite common in the sight of maturity; the 
older men and women who had remained in 
memory as strangely dignified and wise, you 



22 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

found quite common clay, shriveled and nar- 
row, compared to your experience in the world 
to which you long ago had gone. And you can 
trace that inevitable change in the aspect of 
things under other influences than that of age. 
No man can think of a grave or look at a ceme- 
tery, when one he loves is buried, as he did 
before sorrow touched him. A scholar will 
recall with curiosity and humor the days of 
his ignorance, but can never go back to the 
strange views of things he then had. He does 
not want to. The man who has been dis- 
appointed in his old home does not want to 
return to the day when it satisfied him; and 
much as some of us would recall our dead, those 
who have learned the solemn splendor of a 
consecrated grief would not exchange it for the 
careless outlook and incomplete experience of 
our unsorrowing days. It is only in religion 
that we think we would go back. 

Here, for instance, is Thomas Hood with 
those haunting lines: 

"I remember, I remember 

The fir-trees dark and high; 
I used to think their slender tops 

Were close against the sky; 
It was a childish ignorance, 

But now 'tis little joy 
To know I'm farther off from heaven 

Than when I was a boy.'* 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 23 

If the man Thomas Hood was farther off from 
heaven than when he was a boy, it was not 
because he had come to know the fir-trees were 
not against the sky. If that were all that had 
changed, he was just as near heaven as he was 
before; but he had to have a new idea of what 
heaven is. One of the first traditions of the 
children of my childhood was that the thunder 
was caused by the angels rolling barrels. Why 
they should roll barrels, and what the barrels 
were for, never concerned us. But I confess 
I do not believe myself farther off from heaven 
because the barrel theory of thunder has given 
place to a more scientific conception of elec- 
trical disturbances. Here is the trouble with 
many of us in this matter of our former con- 
ceptions of religion. We think of religious ideas 
as fixed and unchanging solid, while all the rest 
of life is a stream of ever-changing idea and 
experience. Here in the book of Revelation, 
for instance, we have a description of what we 
thought was heaven: the city with walls of jasper 
and gates of pearl and streets of gold. And 
every one of us, as children at least, accepted 
that as the bona-fide substance and appearance 
of heaven. Of late years I have heard men 
reject all belief in any immortality at all, be- 
cause, as they said, this description is mani- 
festly impossible as a place for departed spirits, 



24 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

and the size of it as it is measured here would 
be immeasurably too small to accommodate 
the innumerable populations of a redeemed 
world. But I need not throw away all heaven 
because the language of Saint John is inade- 
quate. If this heaven of Saint John is only the 
literary representation of a reality of social 
and personal experience quite beyond absolute 
description, the reality itself need be no less 
credible and identical because the figure no 
longer satisfies. So it is with the living presence 
4 of Christ. The old forms have failed us, but 
the old fact remains. He appears in another 
form, but it is the same Christ. The tragedy 
of many an honest soul is that it seeks to 
identify the form and the fact, the appearance 
and the Person and so seeks an old experience 
in a new emergency. One of two results follows. 
Either such a one fails to find the old experi- 
ence and gives up the search for Christ alto- 
gether; or else such a one finds the old experi- 
ence and so is shrunken to a form he ought 
long since to have outgrown, instead of meas- 
uring up toward the stature of the fullness of 
Christ. Not long ago some of us heard an 
elderly and able man saying that he had never 
found a prayer that suited him like the one he 
said every night now as he used to say it at 
his mother's knee sixty years ago: 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 25 

"Now I lay me down to sleep, 
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep; 
If I should die before I wake, 
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take." 

That sounds like a nice sentiment, but it is 
sheer nonsense. He might just as well have 
boasted that he had found no literature more 
satisfying to him than his old first reader. 
There can be nothing more appealing than to 
hear that prayer on the lips of a little child 
at his mother's knee; but to hear it from a 
man sixty-five years old must bring a sigh or 
a laugh to the heart of God. Sixty years of 
experience and thought and feeling, sixty years 
of labor and love and learning, sixty years of 
struggle and hope, of victory and defeat, of 
tears and laughter, of great joy and mighty 
griefs, and a soul's outlook so narrow that it 
can be covered by the prayer of a lisping child ! 

"... Through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process 
of the suns," 

and their thoughts of Christ must keep pace 
with their years, their experiences, their dis- 
ciplined and expanding needs. Christ is the 
same yesterday, to-day, and forever, but it is a 
sameness of character, not of appearance; of 
response, not of revelation; of effectiveness, not 
of aspect. 



26 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

And this is not merely a discrimination be- 
tween the aspect of Christ to a soul at different 
stages in its knowledge, experience, or age; it is 
a discrimination between the forms in which 
Christ appears to different people. There are 
not wholly lacking men and women who have 
been questioning and unsatisfied and unbeliev- 
ing, and at last, unchristian, because they have 
not had or have not been able to secure the 
experience some one else has enjoyed. Here is 
the answer: "After that he appeared in another 
form, unto two of them." After what? Not 
only after the resurrection, and the burial, and 
the crucifixion, but after he had appeared to 
Mary. He appeared to her in one form; he 
appeared to them in another. When he showed 
himself to Peter we do not know; but in time 
you have the record of his appearances to the 
disciples again and again. To these two it 
was in another form, and it was in another 
form to all the others. Christ is always doing 
that. It is written here, among the records 
of his appearances, that still there were those 
who doubted; and there are men always doing 
that. But that does not reflect upon Christ 
or the reality of his appearances. The infer- 
ence from it all is not that the appearances were 
unreal, but that they were varied; not that 
Christ is gone but that he is present in a mul- 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 27 

titude of forms. The story here of the persistent 
doubt of those who saw him is evidence of the 
truth of the record, not of its falseness. Christ 
appears to every soul. His appearances will 
be as varied as the souls themselves. When 
we see him, we see him each for himself. So 
that as you turn life once more to seek him you 
are to look, not for a form, however dear or 
familiar, but for the fact; not for a particular 
experience but for the unmistakable Christ. 

Ill 

This then is the test question, without which 
all I have said would be but a tedious and 
speculative waste of time. If Christ is con- 
tinually appearing in other and ever-changing 
forms, how shall a soul recognize him? Or to 
put it more personally, I have lost the Christ 
of my childish superstition; how shall I dis- 
cern the Christ of my inquiring and incredulous 
age? I have lost the Christ of the old provi- 
dences which failed me in my time of pain or 
sorrow; how shall I recognize the Christ of my 
dark and disappointed way? I have lost the 
Christ of my narrow and uneducated faith; 
how shall I identify the Christ of my critical 
and more scientific mind? In other words, 
what remains unchanged in all the varied forms 
the living Christ now wears? 



28 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Here in the book I turn these pages with all 
the atmosphere of mystery and awe upon them 
and read that Mary was standing at the tomb, 
weeping, and when she had turned back she 
saw Jesus standing and did not know that it 
was Jesus. It was another form. But supposing 
him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if 
thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou 
hast laid him, and I will take him away." 
Jesus said unto her, "Mary." And then she 
knew him. And I read, again, that Simon and 
Thomas and Nathanael and John and James and 
two other disciples toiled all night with their 
nets upon the sea and took nothing — the most 
laborious work I know — and "when day was 
now breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; how- 
beit the disciples knew not that it was Jesus." 
It was another form. And he spoke to them 
and they caught a multitude of fishes, and at 
the sight and at the voice, John said, "It is the 
Lord." And Simon flung himself into the sea 
to swim to Jesus's feet. And I read, again, this 
story of the two obscure disciples on their way 
to Emmaus, sad and hopeless, and "Jesus him- 
self drew near, and went with them. But 
their eyes were holden that they should not 
know him." It was another form. And then 
"it came to pass, when he had sat down with 
them to meat, he took the bread, and blessed 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 29 

it, and brake, and gave it to them. And their 
eyes were opened, and they knew him." To 
the one it was in sorrow; to the others it was 
in labor; to these two in the stress and medita- 
tion of perplexed but sincere minds. Mary 
found him in her undefeated love, and the 
fishermen found him as they went about their 
work, and these two found him in their welcome 
to new truth. In each appearance it was a 
different form, but in each revelation it was 
the identical fact — a commanding spirit and a 
personal fellowship. Jesus was not something 
they understood; He was Some One whom they 
obeyed. He was not something that clarified 
their opinions; He was Some One who com- 
manded their lives. In neither event was there 
any solution of the mystery. The Christ whom 
Mary recognized was as strange, as unexplained, 
as supernatural, after she had cried, "Rabboni !" 
as when she supposed him to be the gardener. 
The Christ of whom John said, "It is the 
Lord," and to whom Simon flung himself 
through the startled water, was as mysterious 
as before they knew that it was he. The Christ 
whom these two disciples recognized as he 
broke the bread and disappeared from physical 
view was as singular and unaccountable as when 
he walked beside them and their eyes were 
holden. You will never find a Christ without 



30 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

mystery. You can never have a Christ you 
wholly understand. You can never cram God 
into the compass of your mind. And the recog- 
nition of Christ which you want in whatever 
may be the specific need and circumstances 
of your life, will never be reached upon the 
highway of your knowledge. Spiritual things, 
as the New Testament puts it, are only spiritu- 
ally discerned. Character is always the measure 
of vision. These two at Emmaus recognized 
him in the breaking of the bread; it was the 
supreme act of fellowship. But they remem- 
bered that their hearts had burned within 
them as he spake to them in the way. That is 
the unchanging fact beneath whatever forms 
Christ may assume: He commands the heart 
and reveals himself in fellowship. The search 
for what you have thought was a lost Christ 
is not a matter of increased knowledge. The 
child's Christ is as real and regnant as the 
sage's. It is not a matter of a thoroughly 
understood experience. The Christ who seems 
to be disproved by the calamities which have 
disappointed prayer is as real as the Christ of 
wonder-working providence. It is not a matter 
of broad and liberal education. The Christ of 
a narrow orthodoxy and the Christ of the most 
modern criticism vindicates himself alike. It 
is not an explanation but an experience; not 



THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 31 

information but inspiration; not a demonstrated 
argument from premise to conclusion ; but a living 
spirit felt and operative in the personal life. 

How, then, shall we rediscover him? "If any 
man willeth to do his will, he shall know." 
Christ, as I have said repeatedly, is not some- 
thing to be understood; he is a sovereign to be 
obeyed. We shall find him not in the exercise 
of the mind alone but in the direction of the 
heart; not by the instruction of the intellect 
but by the set of the affections. If you want to 
find him, do what he commands. If you want 
to know his presence, give up your life, not for 
him but to him. The arbitrary figure of your 
childhood's imagination will be gone; but the 
certainty of his presence will remain. The 
wonder-working Christ who, you thought, would 
save you from all calamity, is gone; but the 
friendly Christ sustaining you in all calamity, 
will abide. The remote and limited Christ of 
a narrower interpretation will be gone; but the 
spiritual Christ leading into truth is still here. 
It is not a matter of what you will learn of 
him; it is a matter of what you will do with him. 
It does not make any difference whether he 
satisfies your curiosity; it makes a tremendous 
difference whether he dominates your life. It 
is not written that he shall instruct, but that he 
shall reign. 



32 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Those are ominous words of Jesus, "Ye shall 
seek me, and shall not find me." They might 
mean, however, that men should seek him and 
not find him because they did not know 
enough, or because they would not do enough. 
But those are terrible words where he says, 
"Ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sin." 
They mean that men would fail to find him 
because they would not be enough. To find 
him is not a matter of sight but of surrender. 
It is not a question of capacity but of character. 
It does not demand special activity of mind 
but special enterprise of morals. It is not an 
achievement of wisdom; it is a projection of 
will. It is not the direction of your look; it is 
the dedication of your life. He that "willeth 
to do his will" shall know, not what, but whom 
he has believed. And to the dedicated life, 
in other forms perhaps than one has dreamed, 
in meditation, in labor, in loneliness, in pain; 
in great knowledge, in appalling mystery, in a 
mighty joy, in a bewildering sorrow — in another 
form he will show himself as the one Eternal 
Fact, the one abiding fellowship, the one in- 
spiring and sustaining Spirit, till, like the 
disciples of a more dramatic past, one shall 
be glad because whatever else one does not see, 
he shall see, through all the experiences and 
forms of life, his living Lord. 



II 

"THE BEST PORTION OF A GOOD MAN'S 
LIFE" 



Jesus of Nazareth . . . who went about doing 
good.— Acts 10. 38. 



"THE BEST PORTION OF A GOOD MAN'S 
LIFE" 



What is the best word which has been said 
about Jesus? What could be said, to put in a 
concise and yet adequate form the full story 
of his ineffable life and character? One could 
travel, for an answer to such a question, 
through the expanding landscape of nearly 
twenty centuries of literature, for every gen- 
eration since the Man of Nazareth walked his 
sunlit hills has tried to frame in characteristic 
and enduring language its conception of his 
greatness. Historian, soldier, philosopher, saint, 
poet — one after another they have sought to 
compass the stupendous Christ in a book, a 
paragraph, or a phrase. And what magic of 
great expression they have revealed! I know 
no better discipline and profit for a modern 
mind than to read the tenth chapter of Horace 
Bushneirs volume on Nature and the Super- 
natural. Page after page his majestic language 
marches like a proud procession to pay honor 
to the character of Christ. But when you have 
finished you feel that nevertheless not all has 
been said. The New Testament is shot through \ 

35 



36 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

with sentences that flash and glow like gems; 
perhaps none more scintillating than Saint 
Paul's profound "In him dwelleth all the full- 
ness of the Godhead bodily." Is not that, 
surely, the supreme word? And here in secular 
literature is Herder's unfading remark that 
"Jesus Christ is, in the noblest and most per- 
fect sense, the realized ideal of humanity." 
Hard beside that stands the tribute of Jean 
Paul Richter: "He, the holiest among the 
mighty, and the mightiest among the holy, has 
lifted with his pierced hands empires off their 
hinges, has turned the stream of centuries out 
of its channel, and still governs the ages." 
Sidney Lanier tries to phrase him in his subtle 
weft of poetry and calls him the Sovereign 
Seer of Time, the Poet's Poet, Wisdom's 
Tongue, "Perfect Life in perfect labor writ," 
"Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ!" 
But the best thing they have all said leaves 
us with the haunting sense of something more 
I unsaid. What is the great word to be said 
about Christ? Is it perhaps Paul's dramatic, 
"First of all . . . Christ died for our sins"? If 
not, what full-throated sentence or luminous 
paragraph gathers together all the divine and. 
human wonder of the Son of Mary and the 
Son of God? I venture to suggest what seems 
to be a simple remark but may seem also to 



"THE BEST PORTION" 37 

spring from the great deeps of truth, and to 
cover the wide horizons of reality: Simon 
Peter's simple, vast, unpremeditated word: 
"Jesus of Nazareth, . . . who went about doing 
good." 

That sounds like an anti-climax, because 
simple language gives the superficial impres- 
sion of representing simple realities; because 
when we understand easily the meaning of 
words we have the feeling that we understand 
the meaning of the ideas behind the words. 
When, for instance, I say "air," instinctively 
we take for granted that we know what that 
means, though when I say "oxygen" and 
"hydrogen" just as instinctively we feel the 
entrance of an unknown element. But oxygen 
and hydrogen are involved in the reality of 
air and our understanding of air depends on 
our familiarity with oxygen and hydrogen. 
When I say that "Jesus, . . . who went about 
doing good," is perhaps the great sentence writ-* 
ten about Christ, it sounds like a futile remark, 
because going about doing good seems like so 
simple and common a matter. If it were writ- 
ten that he went about doing miracles, or that 
he went about founding governments, or that 
he went about leading armies, or that he went 
about fomenting revolutions, that might strike 
us as something more dramatic and noteworthy. 



38 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

But going about doing good is a very average, 
common, undramatic, rather trivial sort of 
thing to be put down as the great word con- 
cerning Christ. Yet none of these other things 
I have suggested would be true; but this is true. 
As Bishop McDowell has written, "He did not 
go about doing wonders all the time, but he 
did go about doing good all the time." 

I have just said that this going about doing 
good seems such a common, average matter; 
but is it? Run over in your mind all your 
acquaintances and the men and women of 
whose lives you are fairly well informed, and 
note what is the characteristic impression they 
give. I venture that there are very few of 
them who make the primary and paramount 
impression that they are doing good. It was 
Thomas Huxley who said that "Clever men 
are as common as blackberries; the rare thing 
is to find a good one." How do these acquaint- 
ances and others impress you? Some of them 
strike you as being always industrious, some 
as always efficient, some as always courteous, 
some as always happy, some as always plodding, 
some as always gentle, some as always boister- 
ous; but is it not true that very, very few, 
when their names are mentioned, or the thought 
of them arises in your mind, elicit the image 
of persistent and characteristic good deeds? 



"THE BEST PORTION" 39 

Not that all they do is evil, but that they do 
not go about doing good. They go about doing 
something else, and they and we are usually 
content if no evil follows from what they do. 

This becomes more suggestive when you re- 
member that the significant achievements in 
social morality, in the fine, common life of men 
and women, have been wrought by the in- 
frequent folks who made the doing of good their 
main business. That is very true of Christ 
himself; for while, in Bishop McDowell's words, 
he did not go about doing wonders all the time, 
but did go about doing good all the time, all 
sorts of wonders kept following from the good 
he did. That is true of the great servants of 
humanity ever since Wiclifs Lollard preachers 
went about doing good, and the common people 
got the Bible in their own tongue. The Wes- 
leyans went about doing good, and England 
was saved from the social collapse and political 
catastrophe of the French Revolution. Men 
and women have come out of colleges and 
churches, men and women like Jacob Riis and 
Jane Addams, and have gone down into the 
social morass of congested cities, doing good; 
and the whole aspect of everyday justice, and 
neighborliness, and social hygiene, and com- 
munity responsibility, and preventive philan- 
thropy, and legislative obligation, has been 



40 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

vivified. Quaker and Moravian and Huguenot 
and the rest went about the raw, primitive 
settlements of America a century and more 
ago, doing good; and the deep, impregnable 
morality of a great citizenship is the stable 
result in American life. 

This going about doing good is the infrequent 
and the most significant enterprise of which 
men and women know anything at all. And 
without going further, I say boldly, whatever 
it may seem to be now, for Christ to have done 
it involved not only all that is man, but all 
that is God, in his character and life. 

I 
Take account now of how he began. I want 
to speak a good word for Jesus Christ, and I 
make no apology for plunging headfirst into 
theology. You can no more apprehend Christ 
by considering only his human life than you 
can understand an electric light by examining 
the glass globe. You have to go back to the 
unseen to appreciate the light; you have to 
go back to the unseen to begin even to appreci- 
ate Christ. If you deny or disregard Christ's 
mysterious but real life before his advent in 
the world of time, you have to throw away the 
characteristic note of the New Testament 
concerning him. Here it is Paul saying, "He 



"THE BEST PORTION" 41 

was before all things," and here Peter writing 
that he was "foreknown indeed before the 
foundation of the world," and here John, as he 
pens the book of Revelation, paying endless 
honor to the Lamb slain from the foundation 
of the world. Jesus himself, in that solemn, 
priestly prayer on the night of his betrayal, 
with the cross in front of him, claims from God 
his Father the glory which, he says, he had with 
God before the world was; and again reminds 
the Almighty Father, "For thou lovedst me 
before the foundation of the world." 

I do not profess to understand these things. 
I know what the words mean, but the truth 
they shadow out through the broken lights of 
language is too august and awesome for any 
of us to comprehend. But here they are, with 
what truth they let filter dimly down to us, 
and it is from that vast, stupendous, divine 
life before the birth of time that Christ started 
to go about on earth doing good. To see the 
first fragment of what his doing good meant, 
you have to see how he began; and this is how 
he began: "Christ Jesus, who being in the form 
of God, . . . emptied himself." 

You and I will never learn all there is to 
know about that. There are libraries full of 
books about it; and the battlefields of specula- 
tion are noisy with debate about it. We do 



42 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

not, and shall not, know all that it means; but 
we do know that before Jesus went about doing 
good he put all of himself into the going, so 
that this, which seems at first like a simple 
matter of conduct, began in a stupendous 
transaction of character. Perhaps the most 
famous saying of Rousseau is that Socrates 
died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ died 
like a god. But that is only part of the truth. 
Jesus went about on earth doing good as a man 
because he had first emptied himself as a God. 
You will miss the major quality in his great, 
sharp principles of discipleship if you forget 
this. When he told the rich young man to 
go, sell all that he had and give to the poor, 
and then follow him, Jesus knew what he was 
saying; he had done it himself. When he told 
the disciples that no one who had forsaken 
houses, and brethren, and sisters, and father, 
and mother, and children, and lands, for his 
sake, but should receive a hundredfold now 
and in the world to come everlasting life, he 
knew what it meant; he had done it. When he 
laid it down as a rule of conduct that men 
should seek first the kingdom of God and his 
righteousness, and all other things would be 
added to them, he knew what he was talking 
about; he had done it. 

And those first servants of his, of whose social 



"THE BEST PORTION" 43 

conduct and practical generosity Paul writes a 
deathless memorial, were rooted in this same 
experience. "First," as Paul says of them, 
"they gave their own selves." The prodigious 
thing about this doing good as Christ went 
about doing it is that it is an adventure in 
self before it can ever be an enterprise of ser- 
vice. The fatal thing about it is that when it 
is first or primarily a practice of service it is 
a form with no enduring power, a motion with 
no lasting result. Doing good is like a gesture 
in public speech. Any elocutionist can teach 
anybody to make graceful and illustrative ges- 
tures; any elocutionist can teach anybody to 
put gestures into a recited "piece" at the proper 
time and with the proper motion; but if that 
is all there is to it, they are among the funniest 
and most futile things in the world. They 
come, then, by memory and not by meaning, 
and are a matter of distraction instead of dis- 
tinction. They call attention to themselves 
and deflect it from what is being said. But 
when the meaning, the intent, the truth of 
what one is saying grips the mind and soul in 
a passion of reality and the speaker forgets 
himself in his intense desire to drive home to 
others what has so profoundly moved his in- 
telligence and emotion and will, then a gesture 
may be ever so awkward; it may be far from 



44 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

the symmetry a trained elocutionist would have 
taught him, but it captures the instinctive 
feelings of the audience with something of the 
passion with which the speaker is inflamed, and 
itself is lost in the impression of truth which it 
conveys. Doing good, if it be of permanent 
and vital meaning, is like that. It is not a 

t gesture determined on by prudence or the cold 
desire to do one's formal duty; it is the inevit- 
able habit of action sprung from the passion 
of life. It is the visible fruitage of a character 
which itself is consecrated. So that it is greatly 
true, as George Eliot has made her Savonarola 
say, that "the higher life begins for us . . . 
when we renounce our own will to bow before 
a divine law." Back of Christ's going about 
doing good, simple as the words sound, is this 
other, unfathomable declaration, "He emptied 
himself." And back of whatever good conduct 
you and I are honest enough to undertake, 
there must be written, if we sincerely desire 
goodness of deed, this other principle as the 
supreme and determining fact of life, "First 
they gave their own selves." 

II 

But this is only a start in surveying what 
Christ's going about doing good meant. He 
emptied himself, but that was not all. There 



"THE BEST PORTION" 45 

came the time when, hard ahead of him, in 
the sheer path of consistency, as the direct 
result of what he had been and had done, 
were special sufferings, special humiliations, and 
a particular form of death which, from all 
human viewpoints, seemed premature. The 
time drew near when he was about to be cruci- 
fied. He could have avoided crucifixion. He 
could have let his reputation rest on what good 
he had already done. He need not have done 
anything wrong to escape crucifixion; he needed 
simply to do nothing more but to permit what he 
had wrought — healing and encouragement and 
inspiration and ministry — work out its results in 
the contagion of other lives. He could quietly \ 
have preserved his own fine, unselfish, illumin- 
ating life, and his years would have been length- 
ened with no shadow of humiliation and no death 
by the cross upon it. But he was here to do good. 
He had already emptied himself, and now it is 
written that "He steadfastly set his face to go 
to Jerusalem." Going about doing good had 
taken him from the glory which he had with 
God before the world was; it was going now to 
take him to the black and bitter tragedy other 
men had been having since the world was. It 
had taken him from a throne in heaven; it 
was taking him to a cross on earth. It had > 
meant utter unselfishness; now it meant utter 



46 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

resolution. He had had to forget himself; now 
f he had to remember himself. He had had to 
let all he possessed go; now he had to compel 
all that he was to stay. He set his face stead- 
fastly. 

One of the memorable experiences of my life 
was to have been present in Westminster Abbey 
when British people throughout the world were 
celebrating "Empire Day." In the Abbey had 
gathered a congregation that filled it to the 
last space within its ancient walls. It was a 
Sunday afternoon, and the yellow light came 
streaming softly through the great stained glass, 
to fall on men and women from all parts of the 
earth; on brilliant uniforms; on the surpliced 
choir and the robed clergy; on the mourning 
black of many women who sat thinking of dear 
hearts dead in Flanders fields and France, for 
the empire; on the monuments and statues of 
a thousand years of England's heroic and his- 
toric figures. In the shadows of the arches, in 
the lights that fired the windows with a thousand 
memories of mighty deeds and deaths, in the 
wailing music that whispered into silence in 
the lofty nave, one could feel the vast, majestic, 
immemorial march of Time, the stupendous 
tramp of Destiny down the greatening cen- 
turies; and there, in the high pulpit against 
the noble pillar, was the preacher of the hour, 



"THE BEST PORTION" 47 

the Bishop of Ripon, his white hair, his thin, 
pale face like a cameo against the scarlet of his 
Doctor's bands. He was preaching to a nation 
on the breaking point, at the time of its greatest 
fear, its greatest reverses in war, its greatest 
hardships at home, its greatest losses on the 
battlefield, its greatest danger from a foreign 
foe, in five hundred embattled years. And his 
message, in all the glow and power of profound 
yet simple thought and wizardry of speech, was 
this : that, facing all the suffering which seemed 
to lie ahead, under all the agony that was still 
the nation's portion, with all the cost in the 
inestimable sacrifices which must yet be made, 
the cause for which Great Britain had entered 
the war was right, and being right, the duty of 
British men and women was as great to main- 
tain the war at any cost as it had been to enter 
the war with no apprehension of what the cost 
would be. When the service was over, out 
from the Abbey that glowing afternoon, solemn, 
sober, sacrificing to the point of death, the 
brains, the blood, the wealth of England went, 
sustained for victory through whatever un- 
reckonable sufferings the victory might yet 
involve. 

Now, that is not merely a national spirit; it 
is not merely the resolution of the heroic 
Christ; it is the inexorable law by which alone 



48 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

we can hope to go about doing good. Our 
chief business, as many a moralist has told us, 
is with our duty, not with the conditions in 
which it has to be done. And the reason so 
much of the world is suspicious of Christianity 
is that because so many Christians have let 
conditions tone down their conduct of life. Do 
you remember that fine scene John Bunyan 
draws of the pilgrims passing through Vanity 
Fair? "Some said they were fools, some they 
were bedlams, and some, they are outlandish 
men." And when they did not stop even to look 
at the merchandise of the Fair, "one chanced 
mockingly to say unto them, 'What will ye 
buy?' But they, looking gravely at him, said, 
'We buy the truth.' " That is the kind of 
Christian consistency and conduct the world 
demands to-day. It has come reeling back 
from the catastrophe of war, it is shaking with 
the shock of unforeseen rebellions and confu- 
sions in society at large, and it is clamoring for 
Christianity and Christians to reinspire and 
reenforce it to new security and sobriety and 
power. It will cost Christians a new stubborn- 
ness of conviction and a new thoroughness of 
life. This spirit of setting one's face steadfastly 
is the touchstone of discipleship. 

George Adam Smith some time ago told of 
traveling in France and having for a com- 



"THE BEST PORTION" 49 

panion in the railway compartment a young 
Roman Catholic priest, who was soon to go 
to the Congo as a missionary. The priest said, 
among other things, "I am going now to Rouen 
to see my mother for the last time." 

Dr. Smith asked, "Why do you say the last 
time?" 

"Because," the priest answered, "the life of 
a missionary in the region to which I am going 
is two and one half years." 

He set his face steadfastly to go. 

You cannot do good easily any more; but i 
if doing good were easy, it would not be worth 
the doing. How, then, shall we do it? Jesus 
went about doing good, and he said, "I have 
given you an example that ye should do as I 
have done." What did he do? He emptied 
himself. He set his face steadfastly to go. 

Ill 
But, great as this may have been, it was 
hardly more than a fair start. It is one thing 
to march intrepidly toward an inexorable ex- 
perience; it is another thing to endure that 
inexorable experience without shrinking. Many 
a man has sat in a death cell watching the 
days drop, one by one, from the calendar, every 
morning bringing him that much nearer the 
scaffold, and has neither winced nor softened 



50 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

nor complained, only to break down, upon the 
gallows or on the way to the chair, in abject 
terror and the hysteria of the doomed. Or, if 
you do not like that figure, many a man has 
marched up to the fighting fine, holding himself 
to the terrible anticipation, with all the courage 
and heroism of those who have to conquer 
themselves; only to wither and break, in spite 
of himself, under the fierce horror of the bar- 
rage or the enemy attack. Many a Christian, 
in the days when martyrdom was oftentimes 
the price of loyalty, has endured a hundred 
persecutions and looked forward with honest 
bravery to certain death, only to cringe and 
retract and sob out his treason amid the ex- 
cruciating pain of rack or wheel or flames. It 
is one thing to go steadfastly to Jerusalem where 
the cross is only in prospect; what will it be 
when you get to Jerusalem? This is what it 
was for Christ, who went about doing good: 
"Then cometh Jesus unto a place called Geth- 
semane. . . . and he went a little farther." 

There is very little we can say here; there is 
very much that could be said, but only Christ 
could tell the sublime and solemn story, for 
only Christ knows the full and awful deeps of 
that dark place and hour. The words written 
here in the Gospels are, at best, only echoes; 
dim fragments heard far off and remembered 



"THE BEST PORTION" 51 

down the hurrying years. But think what 
even these broken syllables may mean. "My 
soul is exceeding sorrowful" — and it was the 
soul of the Son of God! "And being in an agony" 
— and it was the agony of One who had been 
on an equality with God! Once he had been 
in the form of God, and now he is in an agony. 
That is what going about doing good meant 
for him. I repeat that we cannot say much 
about this transaction in the garden; there is 
too much of it, and it is too vast for us. But 
we know he was alone in it, and in an agony, 
and desolate in it. 

"Deserted! who hath dreamt that when the cross in 
darkness rested 
Upon the victim's hidden face, no love was manifested? 
Deserted! God could separate from his own substance 
rather; 
[ And Adam's sins have swept between the righteous Son 
and Father." 

It is all mystery and awe and silence! But 
we can still hear Christ saying in the shadows, 
"Let this cup pass from me," That is what a 
good many of us have said again and again 
and again in the shadows of many a garden 
where our souls were breaking. And the cup 
does not pass from us or from him. When he 
comes out of the garden and Peter the impetuous 
swings a sword to cut him free of his captors, he 



52 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

is saying, "Put up the sword. . . . The cup 
which my Father hath given me, shall I not 
drink it?" It was in such fashion that he went 
about doing good. 

It seemed, a moment ago, like a very simple 
journey; but it takes him into high and deep 
and awesome places. In the stately, splendid 
spaces of the eternal life, he gave up the glory 
that he had; here in the black shadow of an 
unfathomable experience he took up what he 
was not. It is not enough simply to renounce, 
it is not enough simply to persevere; one has 
to accept the personal results. At one stage 
one has to set himself steadily to do; but at 
another he has to hold himself completely for 
something to be done. "I die," a wounded 
French officer at Verdun wrote on the wall of 
the dugout where he lay dying, "I die, but 
France lives." That is patriotism. Here is 
Christianity: "I die, but Christ liveth in me." 

The next phase of this same period in Christ's 
commonplace career, for all that it has seemed 
to be the supreme phase, is but the inevitable 
and eloquent gesture of the victorious passion 
in the garden. He went about doing good, 
and so "he went out, bearing the cross." There 
is an old legend that Jesus made his own cross 
in the carpenter shop in Nazareth. It is not 
true; but it represents the profoundest truth 



"THE BEST PORTION" 53 

of the real cross, that he made his cross out 
of the life he deliberately lived. You have! 
thought that he was crucified; he was not 
crucified until after he had crucified himself. 
"I lay down my life," he said, "for the sheep." 
"I lay down my life, that I may take it again." 
When Bernard of Clairvaux was preaching 
the Second Crusade to great crowds, in the 
twelfth century, so impassioned was his plea 
that whole assemblies broke out in a great 
cry of "Crosses! Crosses!" and it is recorded 
that during the wild enthusiasm of the First 
Crusade, men burned the cross mark into their 
very flesh, as they were swept with the purpose 
to rescue the sepulcher of Christ from the 
Turks. We do not want the symbol, but the 
world we live in greatly needs to discover in 
us the substance. Doing good seems such a 
mild answer to the fierce demand of men for 
Christianity and Christians to show themselves 
now; but that is because we have not realized 
what it means. For it can mean no less than 
this: "Always bearing about in the body the 
dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may 
be manifested in our body" ; Who "went about 
doing good." 

IV 

I am very glad, however, that the career of 
Jesus as it is written here in the New Testa- 



54 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

ment did not end with Calvary. If, as we saw 
him going about doing good, our last sight of 
him was as he went forth bearing his cross, 
nothing of what has gone before that would 
be of any value to us. We would have seen 
these divine and sacrificial heroisms of his all 
wasted. The modern folks who tell us that the 
real glory of Christ is that he was just like us, 
and that the real wonder of him to men is 
that he is no more than a man, have forgotten 
the fatal thing that statement involves. They 
tell us that his history ends at the cross, and 
that the resurrection is a myth grown up in 
the fine but uncritical enthusiasm of the early 
Christians; but they forget that if that were 
so, there would have been nothing to have 
made early Christians out of the earlier Jews 
or pagans they happened to be. If all we had 
were a marvelous Hebrew peasant, Joseph's 
son, a carpenter, and ever so remarkable a 
religious enthusiast or teacher or prophet, all 
that we would have had left at the end of the 
story would be the fatal fact that the best life 
that ever lived died in disgrace as a reward 
for his goodness. You could never have at- 
tracted publicans and rough fishermen and 
scholars and rich young men, who were equipped 
with a more sensible religion, to throw away 
all they had of comfort and position and give 



"THE BEST PORTION" 55 

themselves to persecution and martyrdom for 
such a memory. "Jesus . . . went about doing 
good"; and it took him out of the ineffable 
splendors of the Eternal Life, and it took him 
to Jerusalem and his humiliation, and it took 
him into the garden and his agony, and it 
took him to the cross and his death; but it did 
not leave him there. He went farther. Accord- 
ing to some forms of the creed, "He descended 
into Hades"; according to Simon Peter, "Being 
put to death . . ., he went and preached unto 
the spirits in prison." Those are statements 
which we do not understand; but both the creed 
and Simon Peter mean this which we do under- 
stand, that when Jesus, who went about doing 
good, was put into a grave, he did not stop 
there. He did not so much go into the grave; 
he went through it. If these other stages in 
Christ's career of doing good have been stern 
and forbidding, flinging hard tasks into our 
faces, smiting our selfishness with visions of 
renunciation, and our love of ease with the 
warning of the cross, here is the winsome 
promise of all that we have dreamed beyond 
the blight of death. An old Indian proverb 
says "The deed does not perish"; and a great 
Christian interpreter of truth has declared that 
the "revelation of man's endless career comes 
through his vocation as a servant of the ideal." 



56 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

How shall we serve the ideal except by doing 
good? and how, in a moral universe, in a uni- 
verse with God in it, how can there ever come 
a time and place where doing good can have 
an end? Do not talk about going to be im- 
mortal; we are immortal as we do good. Do 
not say you are going to have eternal life; we have 
eternal life now, and our feet are already walk- 
ing an endless highway, as they take us about 
doing good. The deed does not perish and the 
good doers can never die. It was written of 
Richard Baxter, whose Saints' Rest has been 
the food on which innumerable saints have 
fed, that "he talked about another world like 
one that had been there, and was come as a 
sort of express from there to make a report 
concerning it." Like him, we shall find our- 
selves growing steadily at home in the world 
which is to be, as in the experience of good 
deeds and good life our immortality reveals 
itself. 

But this phrase of Simon Peter's about 
Christ, that, being dead, he went and preached 
to the spirits, is a very vague, ghostly sort of 
remark. It may be interpreted as being more 
spooky than spiritual. It is true enough that 
Christ went through the grave, but he went 
further and elsewhere than among imprisoned 
spirits. There is a final direction which he 



"THE BEST PORTION" 57 

took, which we can just see and then be silent 
about. He went about doing good, and so 
"he ascended into heaven," as reads the Creed, 
or "He was taken up and a cloud received him 
out of sight," as the New Testament records. 

I suppose this is no time to talk about heaven. 
There is so much to be done on earth; so much 
pain to prevent; so much injustice to correct; 
so much ignorance to enlighten; so much sorrow 
to heal; so much strife and hate and passion to 
subdue; so many things to be accomplished to 
make this world a place of peace and happiness 
and brotherhood, that we have no time to 
talk about heaven. And I suppose men never 
knew so little about heaven as they do to-day. 
Other generations thought they knew a great 
deal about it, but we admit that we know very 
little. We do not know where it is, or what it 
is. But as our lives darken and grow con- 
fused, as we have sorrow, and loss, and struggle 
without progress, and aspiration without gain, 
and dreams without reality; as we worry and 
work and suffer and see the endless round of 
unillumined routine tramping to us down the 
years; as we grow older and lonelier and have 
our graves in God's Acres, and our memories 
of an irrevocable past and a happiness that will 
not return and faces we have lost — well, as 
Hawthorne's queer old Aunt Keziah whim- 



58 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

sically said, we sometimes think we had as lief 
go to heaven as keep on living here. We do 
not want heaven yet, but isn't it good to re- 
member that it is there waiting for us? I do 
not know where it is, but I read that Jesus who 
went about doing good was taken up. I do 
not know what it is, but I hear him saying, "I 
go to prepare a place for you, . . . that where I 
am there ye may be also." 

O Jesus, thou hast promised 
To all who follow thee, 
That where thou art in glory 
There shall thy servants be" — 

and though we do not know what it is or where 
it is, we know who he is, and that is enough. 

This is the supreme word about Christ. It 
sounded very simple and short at the begin- 
ning: "He went about doing good." But it 
begins in heaven and the glory which he had 
with God the Father; it passes all the rounds of 
heroism on earth, and then sweeps back again 
in a majestic circle to the same glory which he 
had before the world was. It is the supreme 
word to be written of us, the supreme ideal 
we may choose to follow. It will take us into 
dark places; it will hold us to dull tasks; it 
will expose us to very commonplace and un- 
inspiring associations; it will cost us a great 



"THE BEST PORTION" 59 

deal that we would like to keep; it will lead us 
to the door of a grave; but there the door 
swings open on the other side, and we shall 
realize, if we are too dull to realize it sooner, 
that the path of the righteous is as the dawning 
light that shineth more and more unto the 
perfect day. To some of us the program looks 
very hard; we cannot see our way. It is a 
leap in the dark, an adventure upon ignorance. 
But it is the way Christ went, leaving us an 
example that we should follow his steps. 



m 

THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 



The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; 
blessed be the name of the Lord. — Job 1. 21. 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 

Few people care for sermons which deal much 
with the preacher's personal experiences; they 
smack too easily of conceit. However highly 
a preacher may regard himself, in the secrecy 
of his own affections, he ought never to let it 
be known; and pronouns in the first person, 
singular, are frequently only handles by which 
an indiscreet man turns himself inside out. 
It may have been well for St. Paul to exhort 
his congregations to imitate him; but a modern 
apostle would do better to choose his examples 
more carefully. We are to preach good news 
of the kingdom of God, not to rehearse, even 
by indirection, an autobiography. Yet this 
text stands out upon a background so personal 
and intimate that I can never so much as read 
it without visualizing the scenes with which 
it is connected in my experience; and I think 
I shall always recount the circumstances in 
which it was first powerfully introduced to 
me. 

I had read these words a great many times. 
In the course of my ministerial life I had 
used them very, very often. For generations 
they have been the classic form in which Chris- 

63 



64 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

tian resignation expressed itself. You and I 
have heard them again and again in pious ex- 
hortations beside the open grave, or trembling 
on the lips of some broken-hearted saint who, 
out of an immeasurable sorrow, bore brave 
witness to unquenched faith and proved that 
many waters cannot drown love. But I had 
never thought of them as the basis of a sermon. 
They seemed too specifically depressing, too 
technically sad, to be lifted up into a challenge 
to buoyant and nervous life. These words 
seemed always to be dressed in black, and going 
to cemeteries. They always seemed to have 
a solemn face and a sad voice like professional 
mourners; or those singular men and women 
of our own time who take a lugubrious pride in 
enjoying a funeral. It hadn't occurred to me 
to preach from them. And then something 
happened ! 

I was on a ship suddenly torpedoed, just past 
midnight, in the Irish Channel. We came 
off the torpedoed ship which sank in less than 
fifteen minutes, were picked up by a British 
torpedo boat which came immediately to our 
relief, and after waiting a couple of hours on 
her sooty deck, while she lay in shallow water 
waiting the signal that all was safe, had traveled 
fifty miles or more to harbor. Crowded on the 
narrow, dirty deck without a chance to sit 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 65 

down, with little shelter from the cool morning 
wind, having nothing left but our clothing and 
some of us not having all of that, we were 
tired, but did not know it; our nerves were on 
edge, but we did not realize it; we were hungry 
and needed no one to tell us that. Then, after 
the two hours' ride over the amethyst of the 
Channel while a rose-and-purple dawn swept 
up the hills of Wales, we landed at a little city, 
felt the firm ground under our feet, sang our 
doxology with jubilant voices and a tide of 
tenderness for the three or four men who had 
gone down with the sinking ship, and then 
turned ourselves to the commonplace business 
of the morning after. A handful of us went to 
church, and found ourselves in a simple Wes- 
ley an chapel, in which there were just fifty -four 
people when the service began. It was all very 
plain; and the marks of war were there; for the 
young men were not there. There was no fine 
singing, no special music by the choir, none of 
the ornamentation with which we sometimes 
think to enrich our worship. But there was sl 
preacher. 

He did not look like it. He wore the tradi- 
tional English clerical clothes. He was plain 
to the point of homeliness of face. His high 
silk hat seemed terribly out of place when I 
saw it on him. He had no graces of physical 



66 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

manner. But when he preached, it was the 
genius of the British pulpit of five hundred 
famous years which sounded through his preach- 
ing. A precision of speech, a felicity of expres- 
sion, a nobleness of form, a depth of insight, a 
breadth of sympathy, and the irresistible im- 
press of conviction, all spoke through what he 
said; and coming up from the sea after the one 
supreme peril of life, this declaration, which was 
the text he chose, thrilled like the sound of a 
trumpet as well as the voice of words: "The 
Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; 
blessed be the name of the Lord." 

I shall not preach his sermon, but I would be 
proud if I could. I do not even remember what 
he said, though the effect of his utterance will 
never wholly die. But these words which were 
uttered by this sage of so many centuries ago, 
lifted up on the lips of that British preacher in 
the midst of a stupendous war and in the hour 
of my own most searching experience, have a 
glow and challenge in them which for me can 
never pass. 

I do not even recall how that preacher began 
his sermon, that day; but I think it was by 
suggesting how impossible it is for us adequately 
to estimate the character and meaning of life. 
Of course there are men and minds that turn 
in quite the opposite direction, and spend their 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 67 

definitions in the attempt to describe the little- 
ness of life. "A brief candle," says Shakespeare, 

". . .a poor player, 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
And then is heard no more. It is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing." 

Sydney Smith, a clergyman of the Church of 
England, who is remembered for his social popu- 
larity rather than his churchmanship, for his 
puns far more than for his piety, said that 
"Man lives only to shiver and perspire," a sig- 
nificant comment on his own spiritual career. It 
is a good many years since I have read Lord 
Chesterfield, and I hope never to read him 
again, but I dimly remember that he somewhere 
wrote of his life that he looked on it as "one 
of those wild dreams which opium occasions," 
and that he, by no means, wanted "to repeat 
the nauseous dose for the sake of the illusion." 
When you remember the broken health of 
Richard Jeffries, you can forgive his pessimism 
as he wrote that human life, at its best, is 
"a foolish little thing." But what will you 
say of Emerson's remark, which he ought to 
have known better than to make, that "Life 
itself is a bubble and a skepticism and a sleep 
within a sleep." So I could go on, if I had one 
of those compendiums of quotations which 



68 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

publishers sell specially to young preachers, 
recalling the depressing definitions men have 
given in their attempts to make life small 
enough and mean enough to fit their individual 
outlooks. It is a relief to turn the other way 
and encourage ourselves with rediscovering, as 
that perverted genius Oscar Wilde once wrote, 
that 

". . . Life is bigger, after all, 

Than any painted angel, could we see 

The God that is within us." 

I hold no brief for Shelley, for whose moral 
vagaries it is now the literary fashion to make 
all excuses, nor do I claim to catch the full 
significance of all that he has written, but it is 
helpful to repeat those inimitable lines of his, 
that 

"Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity," 

and having exposed myself to the pessimism of 
these other minds, I like to come back to that 
grizzly bear of literature, snarling, unlovely 
old Thomas Carlyle, and have him thunder 
at me, 

"Thy life wert thou the 'pitifullest of all the sons of 
earth' is no idle dream, but a solemn reality; it is all 
thou hast to front eternity with." 

And yet, after all, when you have traveled as 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 69 

far as you can in the literature of imagination, 
trying to find a language that will appreciate 
life, when you have imagined majesties and 
magnificences with which to describe it, this 
is the supreme word which can be said of it, 
"The Lord gave it." 

That, of course, cuts like a knife across the 
whole fabric of much scientific and philosophic 
thinking nowadays. Long ago, LaPlace, the 
astronomer, after he had worked out the laws of 
mechanical evolution, was asked about God. 
"I have found no necessity for that hypothesis," 
he replied. Once upon a time men argued that 
there was good enough in the world to justify 
the idea of God — and thought their logic was 
invincible. Nowadays and long since, the ques- 
tion has changed to that of whether the good 
that is here has not come about in such purely 
natural ways as to make the notion of some 
supernatural source absolutely unnecessary, 
while the fine old way in which religion used 
to vindicate its doctrine of a creating God, by 
calling attention to the evidences of design in 
the universe — that, we are told, has been put 
right out of court by the evidence for what we 
now call natural selection. And here comes 
Mr. H. G. Wells, with his gospel of a finite 
God, doing his best for us but having a hard 
time of it, not so much a master of life as 



70 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

tangled up in it, and struggling side by side 
with us, not in the divinity of victory but in 
the humanity of failure. There are half a 
dozen other names which could be mentioned, 
of severe and courageous minds, who can dis- 
cern in all the universe only the mysterious 
and solemn tides of force, creative, but un- 
explored; and above all, unwilled; moving, and 
moving through, the whole sublime but tragic 
drama of universal life. Everything, they tell 
us, is a product of blind cosmic forces. The 
war itself, they say, "was made absolutely 
necessary ... by the conformation of the planet'' 
on which we live, by the "pressure of race pro- 
toplasm," and by "the struggle for existence 
between antagonistic cultures." Whichever way 
they look, before or after, in history or biology, 
in society or life, they do not find any Lord. 

Now, the first curious thing about these 
scientific or philosophic minds is that so many 
of them think they have cleared up the whole 
mystery when they have erased the name of 
God from the story of nature. As if men and 
women who couldn't quite see how the war 
fitted in with the conception of God under- 
stand the whole business when you say "the 
pressure of race protoplasm!" As if the fact 
that the eye is nature's response to the impact 
of light on a sensitive membrane proves that 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 71 

there is no vast purpose behind both the impact 
and the response! As if because a juster and 
more reasonable conception of natural law has 
made us suspicious of the older theories of the 
spectacular interventions of God in the world, 
it has disproved what a church book fourteen 
hundred years ago called "the tranquil oper- 
ation of . . . perpetual providence!" As if hon- 
est folks who can never tell just how an infinite 
God created the world can apprehend clearly 
how a finite God has got himself mixed up with 
the machinery; or bewildered people, perplexed 
because God does not deliver them from the 
struggles of experience, are going to be helped 
and comforted by discovering that God is having 
as much trouble as they are ! As if, in short, the 
whole machinery of nature, its processes, how- 
ever long in time or reducible to law, might 
not be but the method and instrument of an 
informing, personal, purposing and Divine Spirit ! 
In this high quest for origins you face mys- 
tery, no matter in what direction you look. 
It is the simplest wisdom, and I shall follow 
it, to choose that mystery which has meant 
most and best for the whole historic experience 
of mankind; which means most and best to 
mind and heart to-day; and which offers most 
of inspiration and hope and comfort for the 
unhorizoned to-morrows of the world. I will 



72 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

choose, with my fathers, the men of faith and 
vision, the seers and sages of the reverent past, 
I will choose a living, sovereign God, as the 
creative origin and force — "With thee is the 
fountain of life." It remains, amid a ques- 
tioning, confused, and troubled generation, that 
the supreme word to be said about life, your 
life and mine, the supreme word because the 
true word, is this: The Lord gave it. 

II 

Now, in what I have been saying I have 
hinted at one of the constant problems of re- 
ligious faith and thought, a problem which can 
best be put into the form of a question: How 
do we get our beliefs? Of course, one of the 
readiest and most widely accepted answers is 
that we do not get them; that they come to us. 
They seize upon our minds and hearts with 
force or compulsion, so that many a man seeks 
to answer any criticism of his personal attitudes, 
whatever they may specifically be, by saying, 
impatiently, "I can't help what I believe, can 
I?" The fact is, however, that a man can help 
what he believes. Our beliefs, our best and 
strongest and deepest beliefs, do not simply 
come to us; we choose them. They arrive down 
many highways at the gates of our spirit. 
They come along the road of social customs, by 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 73 

paths of personal association; they come to us 
from ideas absorbed unconsciously in child- 
hood; they draw from out the mental atmos- 
phere of our homes; they are of the company 
of inherited traditions gathered in the outer 
courts of consciousness and understanding till 
soon or late, as intelligence and reason and 
judgment develop with our growing years, we 
open the doors of conviction, and this belief and 
that and the other enter in, and become our 
own. But always we invite them in. 

For instance, no man compelled, no first 
idea was so overwhelming as to compel Professor 
Langley to believe that a machine heavier than 
the air could be made to fly successfully. 
Against the ridicule and denials of the world he 
chose to believe that, and his conviction deep- 
ened with his choice. No man compelled, and 
surely with the arguments of the world against 
it, no idea of the earth's configuration was so 
resistless that Columbus had to believe he 
could find a new route to India by sailing in 
the opposite direction. In every bit of faith, 
large or small, the will enters to make a choice; 
though it may be only in the more elaborated 
statements such as this one before us that the 
alternatives are clearly seen. In the realm of 
morals and the spirit particularly it is true that 
you will not believe what you do not choose to 



74 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

believe. "Out of the heart are the issues of 
life," and as Professor James onee penetratingly 
wrote, "If your heart does not want a world 
of moral reality, your head assuredly will never 
make you believe in one." 1 

But nevertheless you must have good reason 
for choosing a belief, especially so crucial a 
belief as that which takes hold of the very 
sources and character of life. Personally, as I 
said a moment ago, I will believe that theory of 
life which tends to make it, as the personal and 
social experience of mankind, best and happiest 
and most useful for unselfish moral ends. I 
will judge the truth of a theory of life, not by 
its premises, but by its conclusions; not by what 
it starts from, but by where it arrives; not by 
what it says, but by what it does. And so when 
Mr. Bertrand Russell, one of the brilliant minds 
of our generation, but an atheistic mind, elo- 
quently expounds his philosophy of life as fol- 
lows, that "... man is the product of causes 
which had no prevision of the end they were 
achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes 
and fears, his loves, and his beliefs, are but the 
outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; 
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought 
and feeling, can preserve an individual life 

1 William James, The Will to Believe, Longmans, Green & Co., Pub- 
lishers. Used by permission. 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 75 

beyond the grave; that all the labors of the 
ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all 
the noonday brightness of human genius are 
destined to extinction in the vast death of the 
solar system, and that the whole temple of 
man's achievement must inevitably be buried 
beneath the debris of a universe in ruins," and 
that "only on the firm foundation of unyielding 
despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be 
safely built;" 1 when, I say, Mr. Russell expounds 
the philosophy of life to that disastrous conclu- 
sion, I can only reply: "Your soul's habitation, 
sir, is not in that unyielding despair, but in a new 
conception of life. The awfulness of your con- 
clusion argues the falseness of your premise. It 
is the best which is most likely to be the truest ; 
and the conception of life which makes for the 
largest happiness, the noblest morals, and the 
most inspiring future, is the more credible con- 
ception. If your theory ends in despair, reason 
would say, Do not hug your despair; throw 
away your theory." 

For the sake of an illustration, imagine 
that, groping in the dim light in that early 
morning hour at which all ministers emulate 
John Wesley's habit of rising, I find a pair of 
shoes marked with size I am presumed to wear; 

1 Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays, p. 60f., Longmans, Green & Co., 
Publishers. Used by permission. 



76 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

and with all my searching in this theoretical 
pile of shoes I find no others marked with that 
same size; accordingly, it is with what Mark 
Twain called the calm confidence of a Christian 
that I put on that particular pair. But now, if I 
find that when I have them on, they burn and 
torture me until life threatens to be a pedal 
agony, I have two courses of action open to 
me. I can preserve this philosophic air and 
say: These shoes are my size; they fit me per- 
fectly, but they hurt like the mischief. There- 
fore my soul's habitation can henceforth be 
only in the firm foundation of an unyielding 
despair. That is the philosophic attitude of 
Mr. Bertrand Russell and all his school of 
thinkers who claim to have found the world a 
blind and purposeless mechanism without a 
mind or character behind it. On the other hand, 
since these shoes hurt my feet, I may try other 
pairs marked with quite different sizes, till I 
find a pair which, when I put them on, bring 
ease and comfort and a sense of fitness, and 
while pondering the profound mystery as to 
why shoes marked with my size hurt me ter- 
ribly and shoes marked quite differently fit me 
with perfect comfort; a reasonable course of 
thought would arrive at the conclusion that 
I have mistaken my size. I need not hide my 
soles in unyielding despair, but in this other 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 77 

pair of shoes. And that is the course of reason 
in choosing which belief we shall hold concern- 
ing the character of life. Which one provides 
the reasonably largest peace, the more durable 
moral power, the more sustaining and impreg- 
nable hope? 

Applying this method of judgment, what will 
this belief that life is the gift of the Lord do for 
us? — for this is the ultimate test of religious 
faith; not philosophical completeness but prac- 
tical experience. And the answer is, First of 
all it will take away our skepticism as to the 
value of life. 

Some of us may remember, from a number of 
years ago, the discussion which was carried on 
throughout the country, in magazines and on 
platforms and in pulpits, on the subject, "Is 
Life Worth Living?" The discussion, with its 
pessimistic drift, was accompanied by a notice- 
able increase in the number of suicides — and 
still there are those who tell us that it makes no 
practical difference what a man believes. You 
cannot have such a discussion at all on the 
premise that the Lord has given life. Horace 
Walpole wrote among a hundred epigrams for 
which he is remembered, that "Life is a comedy 
to him who thinks, and a tragedy to him who 
feels." But he forgot to add that that depends 
on what he thinks about, and how narrowly re- 



78 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

stricted are his feelings. If life has come solely 
from a mass of protoplasm coagulated by acci- 
dent and fermented by chance, it may very 
properly travel in despair and end in a handful 
of mold. But if, through protoplasm or any- 
thing else, it has come from God, no matter 
how round-about may be the journey, it must 
travel in high hope and end in splendor. For 
when all other measurements of value fail, you 
can still estimate its worth by the character 
of God who gave it. I remember, some time 
ago it was now, I saw a group of excited boys 
clamoring around one of their number in the 
center of the excitement. The boy in the center 
was displaying something in which that portion 
of the neighborhood was mightily and rather 
noisily interested. Then, through the chorus 
of comment and debate, there came the dis- 
cordant note of disparagement — some one is 
always taking the joy out of life — and one boy 
was saying, "O, that's not much good." And 
then, above the noise and the challenge of dis- 
paragement, the owner of it answered with a 
conviction that silenced all criticism: "It is 
much good; my father gave it to me." 

It is so that I conceive a man or woman w : ll 
stand, with this firm faith that the Lord has 
given us life; it is so such a man or woman will 
stand amid the clamorous and confusing voices 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 79 

of the day. For our life to-day is greatly ques- 
tioned. It is harder than life ever was before it, 
we think. The drudgery of it wears our souls 
thin. The harassments of it take the spring 
and zest from experience. War may be heroic, 
and the victory is sublime; but war interprets 
itself to most of us in high costs of food and 
coal and clothing, in pinching economies, in 
disappointing retrenchments and discomforts, in 
sacrifices of stimulating refinements and sound 
pleasures, till the heroic and sublime are buried 
beneath the sordidness and anxieties of daily 
care. Pestilence has swept us. We have known 
the wretchedness and fatigue of long battles 
with disease. Some of us have known the 
blinding mysteries and pain of utterly inex- 
plicable sorrow. And in our hearts and on our 
ears and out of a score of experiences and 
memories and sufferings and circumstances, 
clamorous voices seem questioning what life 
is, after all; and here and there, when we are 
tired of it all, some experience, unusually 
severe, flings the taunt and challenge into our 
very souls, Life, your life, isn't much good. 
O, I bid you hold hard this saving, mastering 
conviction, the boldness and the glory of it, 
"It is much good; for all its gray and grievous 
beleaguerments, for all the mystery of its 
disappointments and its pain; it is much 



80 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

good; my Father give it to me. The Lord 
gave it." 

And then, again, this belief that the Lord 
has given life will prevent our misuses of it. 

There is no safeguard against waste like a 
sense of peculiar honor in the source of the thing 
otherwise wasted. In those old days — how long 
ago they seem now ! — when apples were so com- 
mon that you could eat two or three without 
robbing your children of their rights of inheri- 
tance or mortgaging your home, we used to 
be fairly careless as to how the apples went 
around our house. They were so common that 
a man once came from Chicago to sell me ten 
acres in an Oregon orchard, which would have 
made me independently rich, according to the 
prospectus, in three years; but I did not buy. 
And when I stop to buy a single apple at a 
fruit stand before taking a train, I find now 
that one of them costs as much as my first 
installment on the ten acres would have been. 
But even in those good old days, when apples 
were a food instead of a curio or a confection, 
when a certain friend sent us a special box of 
them, as he did every once in a while, they 
were guarded like the pomegranates of Eden; 
and woe to the child who dashed wildly in 
betimes to fill his pockets. The stern voice 
of authority, keeping ceaseless vigil over the 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 81 

treasures, summoned him: "Are those some 
of the apples Judge Surface sent us? Well, 
you put them straight back where you got 
them!" The source compelled a safeguard 
against waste. 

It is not otherwise with life. When Omar 
Khayyam conceives that 

"We are no other than a moving row 
Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go," 

nothing is more natural or logical than that 
he should sum up his counsel for our lives, in 
his praise of wine and intoxication: 

"Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why; 
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where." 

If life is only a development from purely natural 
origins, what difference does it make how I 
spend it? I may throw it away in excesses; I 
may shrivel it in selfishness; I may waste it in 
sin; I may cheapen it with a riot of shabby 
pleasures; I may let it drift with the stream of 
least resistance, without worthy ambitions, kind 
habits, or generous ideals. Whatever I am or 
do is but a part of the meaningless scheme of 
things; the bad isn't bad and the good is not 
good; it is all just life. But let me believe 
thoroughly, and remind myself daily, that the 
Lord gave my life, and I shall not waste it. 
Like Pippa the mill-girl Browning has made so 



82 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

real that we think she must have truly lived 
and sung, every day will be a twelve-hour 
treasure not to be squandered without peril of 
shame and mischief. We shall know that kill- 
ing time is a slow but certain method of suicide; 
and to do less than one's best is to rob one's 
self beyond all chance of reparation. And when 
doubts of our usefulness and value haunt us; 
when poisonous questionings force themselves 
into heart and mind, as to what does it 
matter about us, our small estate, our obscure 
heritage, our blind, unnoted circle of drab 
routine, let us grip once more the challenge of 
these words about our life: The Lord gave it; 
then, surely, 

"All service ranks the same with God: 
If now, as formerly he trod 
Paradise, his presence fills 
Our earth, each only as God wills 
Can work — " 

and though we part company from Browning 
there and refuse to believe that we are no more 
than God's puppets, we build our souls upon 
the fact that in his kingdom where faithfulness 
alone is the measure of nobility, ". . . . there is 
no last or first." 

Ill 
But you haven't exhausted this conception 
that God has given life; you haven't even 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 83 

reached perhaps the supreme meaning of it 
when you have watched it save life from 
skepticism and protect it from misuses. Some- 
times skepticism of life goes so far as to eat 
away all moral value whatever; sometimes the 
misuses of life are carried so far that life itself 
is a battered, broken, ruined thing. The great 
problem of religious thinking, and the great 
question which, in our more serious and aspir- 
ing moments, you and I chiefly find ourselves 
facing, is the problem and question of personal 
sin. For what is sin, in the light of what I 
have been saying? Is it not a disregard of the 
divine origin of life? Is it not a questioning, 
in will and act and desire, of the value of life? 
Is it not a misuse of life? all carried to their 
logical conclusion in moral wreckage and re- 
volt? What to do with life when it had got 
this far was always too much for the older 
philosophies and religions of the world. The 
philosophies had interesting theories as to what 
it all finally came to, for the vast universe, 
for the absolute mind, and the like; but they 
had nothing to say to or for the single, broken, 
lost life itself. The religions had some noble 
conceptions of sublime and austere transactions 
going on behind the veil of death; but they 
couldn't show a single thing happening to the 
life this side of death, that it needed to have 



84 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

happen to it. Buddhism, with the heartache 
of the world in it, couldn't do anything better 
than to forecast a terrifying journey for each 
life, through ten thousand other forms and 
lives, suffering, drudging, sorrowing, dying, 
endlessly reborn into ever lengthening journeys, 
until at last the life itself should slip out of 
consciousness into the unconscious ocean of 
the All. Because all of them — philosophies and 
religions alike — either started from the wrong 
premise or reached the wrong conclusions. 
These old Hebrew folk for whom Job seems here 
to speak, had the right premise, and they drew 
the right conclusion; though they missed some 
of the links in the great chain of logic. "The 
Lord gave; and the Lord hath taken away." 
They had the theory, but they failed to make 
the only adequate application of it; and so, 
when they were caught in the choking grip of 
formulas and routines that were smothering 
their spirit instead of expanding and inspiring 
it, they turned their faces away from the One 
who was among them saying, "I am come that 
they might have life, and have it more abun- 
dantly." They failed to see, as so much of 
our modern scientific, psychological, philoso- 
phical thinking has failed to see, what follows 
from this conception that the Lord gave life. 
To-day the busy thinkers are trying to show us 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 85 

how Christ is no more than the rest of us; or 
else they are trying to discover how he could 
get here without wrecking what they presume 
to be the whole mechanism of nature. His 
deity, they have told us, is impossible; God 
just couldn't come into humanity in that specific 
and limited way; and all the recreative moral 
power of which Christians have made so much 
can be nothing more than the influence of a 
good man's example They have all forgotten 
that if God has given life, he can give his own 
life; and nothing at all so fits the character of 
God as this figure of Christ coming, living, 
dying consciously for the remaking of shriveled, 
broken lives, because "in him was life, and the 
life was the light of men." 

So that from this simple and quite convenient 
premise which every man and woman can re- 
member and remind themselves of, that the 
Lord gave life, we can come triumphantly to 
the solution of our deepest, painfulest question 
of personal sin: God hasn't quit giving. 

And now we shall have to go back to child- 
hood to see the truth clearly, for there is no 
theological treatise so direct and satisfactory 
as childhood and its relations to parenthood, 
as analogies of the Divine and human fellow- 
ship and its intercourse. And so I recall a 
doll that came in some good, old-fashioned way 



86 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

to a little girl; and some little girls, while they 
love dolls, sometimes fail to treat them with 
consideration for their physical limitations; 
and rocking chairs are quite indifferent as to 
what china hands they crush and the brilliant 
wax complexions — even like some others — yield 
to the stern impress of weather and sharp 
corners; and the most wonderful of hair posi- 
tively refuses to stick under conditions of tem- 
pestuous stress and agitation ; and gravity works 
its ruthless will with sawdust when large holes 
are punched through even the most delicate 
of kid bodies — and so it came to pass that what 
had once been a doll with which to challenge 
the world, was become a strange, unlovely 
figure, headless, painfully shrunken as to its 
discolored and soiled body, handless, with one 
chaste limb amputated at the knee and the 
other shockingly flabby and afflicted with Saint 
Vitus's dance. At first, the little girl's affection 
seemed not to fail, but twined pathetically 
around the remnant of once imperial beauty; 
and then it began to lose its warmth, and then 
love changed to shame, and dislike and re- 
pugnance; and at last on a bitter day she came 
crying to the arbiter of her doll destinies, saying, 
"I don't like Mabel any more; she's got no 
head, an' the sawdust is gone, an' her hands 
are gone, an' her foot's gone, and she's ugly „ an' 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 87 

I'm ashamed of her when other little girls have 
such nice dolls." And what was an arbiter of 
doll destiny to do? 

The rough man's voice of the world outside 
the doll realm had a simple answer: "Throw 
the wreck away and get a new one." And then 
the arbiter of destiny touched the secret of 
all love and immortality and redemption when 
she replied: "But that wouldn't be Mabel." 
And so, in the skill of hands that understood 
and love that sympathized with love, a new 
head, like and yet not like the old, unscarred, 
unscratched, unmutilated; rejuvenated hair, re- 
combed and luxuriant; and new hands, were 
fixed in place. A new foot grew where the old 
stump had drooped; and the lumpy, empty, 
soiled body, refreshed and cleansed and filled 
again to all the rounded curves of pristine days, 
took shape. And on a blithe and gracious morn- 
ing the little girl woke to find all that she had 
loved and lost come back, not a new, but a re- 
newed doll; and she clasped her treasure to 
her happy heart as she cried: "0, it's Mabel 
all over again; and now I'll keep her so." 

It's a foolish sort of illustration, but God 
may still choose the foolish things to illuminate 
the wise; and I look into my own experience, 
and out at the experience of a thousand other 
folks just like myself, and I see that once upon 



88 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

a time we had life lovely and unsullied, and all 
the wonder of ineffable destiny was ours to 
make. And then time has gone tramping over 
us, and the years have crushed us down; and 
passions have marred and soiled us; and hates 
and hurts and recreancies and treasons of the 
soul have sapped the very substance of our 
spirits; and sorrows have maimed us. To put 
it in a word, sin has stamped, and stained, 
and broken us; and we did not know that the 
process was going on, till one day, in some 
terrifying vision, we saw ourselves; and we saw 
other folks around us with such gracious lives, 
winsome, and wonderful, and having power and 
something of peace, and all the loveliness of 
spirit we had dreamed; and suddenly then we 
knew what we were, and despairing, and dis- 
gusted, and helpless in the face of it, we lifted 
up our lives to the great God that seemed to 
gloom and grieve above us, crying in our very 
spirits, as we looked at our life: "I don't like 
it any more. Its ideals are gone, and its purity 
is gone, and its service is gone, and it's ugly, 
and I'm ashamed" — O, like Job, some of us 
have cried, "Wherefore I abhor myself, and 
repent." 

And what does the great Arbiter of our 
destinies do? The voice of cold materialism 
says harshly, "Throw the wreck away, and 



THE CLUE TO EXPERIENCE 89 

create a new one," but the voice of Infinite 
Love replies, "Ah, that wouldn't be this life." 
We shall never know how, and we may never 
comprehend the wonder of the why, and we 
may never be able to tell the tragic, triumphant, 
unexplainable transformations that take place; 
but out of the struggle and the surrender and 
the shame, old ideals do come back, and the old 
stuff of purity and power, and old and enlarging 
passion for service, and we wake to see what 
has happened, and the souls within us cry out, 
"Why, it's my life made all over again; and 
now I'll keep it so!" "For the wages of sin is 
death; but the gift of God is eternal lifie in 
Christ Jesus our Lord." The Lord gave it. 

The Lord gave life: Yes; and the Lord has 
not quit giving: yes; and the Lord gives new 
life in Christ Jesus: Yes; — and then the Lord 
taketh away. If the first part of the text 
gathers up our confidence in the present, the 
Lord gave, this second part is our hope for the 
future, the hope of all tired hearts and lonely, 
aching and breaking as they look past the 
graves in their God's Acres to the sunsets, and 
wondering how they will ever bear about their 
weight of loneliness and sorrow: The Lord 
taketh away. If I had only Bertrand Russell's 
"nothing preserves an individual life beyond 
the grave," I could never bear to think of my 



90 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

dead mother; and if I thought about God at all, 
it would be to conclude what stupendous folly 
it must be to have a world full of good folks, 
trained through fifty, sixty, seventy years, to 
gentleness and unselfishness, and reverence, and 
sacrifice and faith and prayer, only to turn them 
into dust and silence and the dark. And if I 
could believe with Bertrand Russell that nothing 
preserves an individual life beyond the grave, 
then I would believe with him that all the soul 
has to hide in is the firm foundation of unyielding 
despair. I would not have any God, either, if 
all I could get out of life was a hole in the ground. 
More than that, I do believe with Bertrand 
Russell that "no fire, no heroism, no intensity of 
thought and feeling can preserve an individual 
life beyond the grave." Of course they can't; 
nobody ever said they could. We have more 
than all of them; we have God. We do not 
know why these loves of ours are taken, why 
we should not have them through all the sun- 
shine and the strength of time in a world where 
death had never entered; but it is the Lord who 
hath taken away. And while it is not implied 
in the text, it is involved in the character of 
God that he will give them back again. 
"Blessed be the name of the Lord." 



IV 
THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 



He endured, as seeing him who is invisible. — 
Hebrews 11. 27. 



K THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 

Some years ago a political leader in Massa- 
chusetts, in the thick of a failing campaign, 
was reported to have said to a compromising 
colleague, "God Almighty hates a quitter." 
I do not venture to say how far an American 
politician, even though he have a Boston accent, 
can be safely followed as a theological guide; 
but both the Old and the New Testaments 
would seem to corroborate this crisp New Eng- 
land creed. From page after page they fling 
out the admonition that the supremacy of life 
does not depend upon skill or cleverness; the 
battle is not always to the strong nor the race 
to the swift; the supremacy of life depends upon 
endurance. The qualities which make for saint- 
hood are neither brilliance nor culture, but faith, 
patience, labor; and not he that shineth, but 
he that endureth shall be saved. 

To this special value of durability, rather 
than to other and more dramatic qualities, the 
common observation and habit of mankind 
bear witness. Looking back to what must be 
for years the preacher's chief source of illus- 
tration, the Great War, there will never be two 
minds as to the most notable military achieve- 

93 



94 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

ment of the French. Of course we shall not 
forget the Marne, where at the beginning of 
the conflict, they flung back the gigantic Ger- 
man host, as by apparently more than human 
effort, and saved the world in the hour when a 
Prussian success would have been fatal. We 
shall not lose sight of the terrible battles of 
the Champaign, or those dashing victories which 
began the German collapse in 1918. But 
always there will stand as the supreme reve- 
lation of the French spirit that bitter, agon- 
izing, unspeakably heroic defense of Verdun; 
when Frenchmen did not achieve, but simply 
endured what seemed daily to be the unen- 
durable, and wrote upon the grateful recollec- 
tion of all time to come the one immortal 
shibboleth of the war, "They shall not pass." 

Nor is this the story of the French alone.. 
As the smoke that clouded the battlefields has 
lifted to leave us the clear vision which sees 
"The Great Time" whole, as the records of our 
English-speaking regiments are written and 
their accumulated heroisms of attack and cap- 
ture are numbered with the golden deeds of 
history, one can easily believe that we shall 
eventually give first place to that Canadian 
division which could not advance, but which, 
for six long days, stood the continuous attack 
of three German corps before the beleagured 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 95 

city of Ypres, twelve thousand men holding 
the highway to the channel ports against ten 
times their number. If perchance our ties of 
blood shall claim some symbol beside that 
burial ground in front of that ruined city where 
of the twelve thousand Canadians who went 
in, ten thousand are sleeping where they fell, 
beneath the maples that tell the new world's 
pride, it will be those graves where lie the 
American gunners who did not charge or cap- 
ture or advance, but who held the bridges 
against the exultant German legions as they 
thundered down on Chateau-Thierry. They 
endured. When you think of Belgium, — its 
army was doubtless brave and its king cour- 
ageous and its burgomasters heroes all; but 
the nation is enshrined in the memories of all 
men to come, not as Julius Caesar remembered 
it, because the Belgians are the bravest of all 
the Gauls, but because they were the most 
enduring. They were oppressed beyond our 
appreciation of it. They lost their liberties, 
their comfort, their peace of mind, their safety 
even to think. They saw their loved ones 
assassinated, their daughters sacrificed, their 
sons enslaved. But they were never defeated 
in their souls. In the blackest hour the nation 
ever knew, as the anniversary of their inde- 
pendence approached to find them in the bit- 



96 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

terest bondage of their history, and there could 
be no commemoration that would not seem the 
worst of mockeries, Cardinal Mercier dared 
write them all, ' Let us prepare for it in labor, 
in patience, in fraternity." Nothing can exceed 
the heroisms of the Italian armies, performing 
the most spectacularly difficult feats of engineer- 
ing and artillery as they took possession of the 
ice-crowned Alps; perhaps, all told, the most 
dramatic and difficult military operations, with 
the most brilliant success and incorrigible spirit, 
in the whole history of war. But we have 
mostly missed it entire. The high drama has 
been too high. It is the drudging endurance 
of Belgium and France, the indomitable obsti- 
nacy of the British Tommy, which has captured 
our imagination and occupied our praise. The 
victorious quality of life, after all, seems to be 
not its dash but its durability; not how far 
or how splendidly it can acquire or achieve, 
but how much and with what spirit it can bear. 
And no one will deny that to bear is much 
harder than to do. Every one of us has had 
his experience, in some measure, when disap- 
pointment or sorrow or pain or a biting loss, 
has broken like a storm or risen like a tide 
upon us, and we have been helpless in it all. 
"If there were anything I could do,' we have 
said, "if there were anything I could do"; and 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 97 

our very language is incompetent to express the 
depth of our feeling. Yet all the time men and 
women, in high and critical estate, and others 
in far greater numbers, lost in the common 
obscurities of everyday life, keep right on en- 
during, until there is nothing in all the history 
of heroes more stirring than the quiet courage, 
the intrepid strength of soul, the utter victory 
of spirit, with which our fellow-men have met 
and mastered experiences like ours, and more 
excruciating. Here it is the young William 
Penn, whom we conceive rom our average 
American history as a benevolent old gentleman 
under a spreading tree successfully concluding 
a highly profitable real estate deal with the 
Indians, but who at twenty-four was imprisoned 
in London Tower by the dishonest and in- 
triguing influences of his time. Neither im- 
prisonment nor threats could move the young 
man from his convictions or his courage. "They 
shall know," he said, "that I can weary out 
their malice." Here it is Nathan Hale, accom- 
plishing nothing for all the risk he had taken, 
and standing on the scaffold amid the insults 
of a ribald British soldiery gathered to see the 
execution of a spy, and regretting, in that 
classic utterance, not that he had not achieved, 
but that he had no more lives with which to 
endure more martyrdom. Here it is the crude, 



4- 



98 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

grotesque, unprepossessing figure of John Brown 
going out upon the Virginia hills to die a 
traitor's death; but writing from his fatal cell 
those prison letters which have in them even 
yet a prophet's calm passion and a seer's truth. 
There, infinitely above all lesser heroes, is the 
Man of Nazareth, setting his face steadfastly 
to go to Jerusalem where the cross was waiting; 
and going to the cross with the ineffable splen- 
dor that conquered the criminal beside him, 
and still wins the world. They endured. 

How did they do it? For the supreme test 
with which life is challenging us to-day is this 
same test of endurance. /i It seems increasingly 
difficult to make headway against the forces 
rolling in upon us from the confusion of the 
world. Profiteers have been painting their dis- 
honor with the wealth they have gathered from 
the tragedy of the race; politicians are still 
clambering up the devious steeps of power upon 
the credulity, the fears, the sentimentalities, 
the ignorance of the crowd; here and there, for 
a flickering hour, a man on a platform or in 
a pulpit or with a pen seems to have seized 
some place of leadership; but the great multi- 
tude of us are battling with a world that grows 
more difficult for the necessities of life. The 
great multitude of us, at the expenditure of 
all our powers, are able to do little more than 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 99 

hold such feeble footing as we have. The 
great multitude of us are no leaders, but are 
struggling desperately to hear, if that may be, 
among the snarling clamors of the day, some 
voice to follow which will not die away in error 
and incompetence. Our trust in the resources 
of humanity, our confidence in ourselves, our 
expectation of the future, our conviction of 
the moral order, our very faith in God, all are 
caught in a mighty bewilderment. Matthew 
Arnold's pessimism, which used to be merely 
poetry, has become too much our practical life: 

"The world which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor any help for pain, 
And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

What can we do? We make no headway. 
We cannot see in men the generosity which we 
used to think we saw, nor any reasonableness 
in society, nor any satisfactions with ourselves; 
and our evidence for God seems withering. 
What can we do? Why, we can do the one 
thing we most need to do, namely, we can 
endure. We can gather to ourselves once more 
what measure of trust in men we have, our 



100 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

hope of society and our confidence in ourselves, 
our expectation of the future, our conviction of 
the moral order and that faith in God which, 
in easier and happier days was part of our 
deeper life; we can gather all that together, as 
a man in a storm gathers to himself whatever 
possession he is carrying, and holding it un- 
harmed, we can let the tempest of these present 
times beat down. The gale may lash us, but 
we can keep our treasure safe. If it be that we 
cannot grow a greater faith or win a new victory 
over self or circumstance, we can endure. And 
because we can, and because, as Christian men 
and women, as not before in our generation, 
we must endure, I purpose to speak to you of 
some of the implications of these great words 
spoken long ago of a man mightily beset and 
equally victorious. "He endured, as seeing him 
who is invisible." 

I 

The words speak to us immediately of the 
sustaining power of a great and disciplined 
insight; than which there is no larger reenforce- 
ment within the reach of men. Do you re- 
member that noble portrait Charles Dickens 
draws for us at the close of The Tale of Two 
Cities, when Sidney Carton makes his great 
sacrifice and dies upon the guillotine in place 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 101 

of the husband of the woman he loves, "It was 
said of him, about the city that night, that it 
was the peacefulest man's face ever beheld 
there." The secret of Sidney Carton's power 
to endure, the clue which the novelist permits 
us to see explains his peaceful face, is in the 
words which Dickens puts into his mind before 
he dies. "I see," he says, "I see a beautiful 
city and a brilliant people rising out of this 
abyss — the lives for which I lay down my life, 
peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy in that 
England which I shall see no more." He en- 
dured as seeing the invisible. 

But that is not simply the imagined psy- 
chology of a hero of romance; it is the deepest 
fact in the lives of practical men, the one 
dominant reality in those very heroisms to 
which, a moment ago, I made reference. It 
was that same penetrative insight which held 
those outnumbered French battalions in their 
unbreakable defense of the sector of Verdun; 
which made them unconquerable alike by Ger- 
man divisions and German guns and the piti- 
less tempests of midwinter. They saw! They 
saw the invisible! They saw that ideal, not 
yet existent France of theirs, risen out of 
the anguished catastrophe of the war, strong, 
victorious, forever secure; to maintain among 
the nations her traditional ministries of in- 



102 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

tellect and spirit; to keep alive with kindling 
beauty the increasing fires of the freedoms 
she had won from out her centuries of strife. 
It was all incarnate in the last word of a French 
soldier dying there where he had fallen: "We 
are but a moment in the life of eternal France." 
It was that same sustaining insight which up- 
held the Belgians through the long tragedy of 
the German occupation. They saw, amid the 
bondage, the agonies, the shames of the day in 
which so miserably they lived, the invisible 
reality of the Belgium which not only was to 
be, but which, even then, existed as a spiritual 
order of life and relationships, far beneath the 
reach of German beastliness; the unconquerable 
Belgium of the spirit which no oppression 
could destroy. 

That also is the story of the young William 
Penn, seeing from his cell in London Tower 
the unchangeable, utter right, the justice which 
must exist though all the ministers of the crown, 
and the crown itself, be sworn to injustice, 
and therefore sure of his strength to weary 
down the malice of kings and prelates. The 
secret of Nathan Hale on the scaffold from which 
he was so soon to hang, is in these same words: 
he saw. He saw the America of his hopes and 
confidence and love; the liberties that were to 
be wrested from the very hands which choked 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 103 

out his own life; the greatening years of the free 
commonwealth which was to come. So John 
Brown, in the barren room where he waited for 
his death warrant, and riding to his death upon 
his own coffin, and standing on the fatal gallows 
twelve long minutes waiting for the drop to 
fall, had neither fears nor regrets; and when 
the commanding officer beside his swinging 
body, said "So perish all enemies of Virginia!" 
the blind man, as his biographer has said, 
was not "he who swung from the rope above, 
for his eyes had seen, long before his light had 
failed, the coming of the blue-clad masses of 
the North who were to make a mockery of 
Colonel Preston's words and strike down the 
destroying tyranny of slavery, to free Virginia 
from the most fateful of self-imposed bonds." 1 

And is not that the profounder reality of the 
Man of Galilee? How did he endure? How 
did he endure the tumult of sin that roared 
against him, the cavilings and conspiracies of 
scribe and Pharisee, the oppositions of those 
he loved, the recreancy of those he served, the 
betrayals of those he trusted? "I saw," he 
said, "I saw Satan fallen as lightning from 
heaven." How did he bear the agony of the 
Passion, the unfathomable anguish of his awe- 
some death? He saw. "Who," it is written 

1 Villard: John Brown, p. 557, Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers. 



104 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

of him, "who, for the joy that was set before 
him endured the cross." He saw the invisible 
blessedness of the world that was to be re- 
deemed. 

I have been traveling thus far afield among 
these more dramatic illustrations of the prin- 
ciple with which I started a moment ago, in 
order to come to the same principle operative 
in the commonest lives of the most common 
of us. For the power which nerves us to our 
unpublished drudgeries is this same power of 
an insight that sustains. The young man, in 
his days of subordinate and sometimes un- 
pleasant labor, lives upon his vision of the man 
he is eventually to be. The girl, enduring the 
hardships of her discipline, lonely, poor, with 
no amusements, with only the harsh injunctions 
of her teachers and her enforced exclusion from 
the normal social happiness of her years, en- 
dures only as she sees the artist she will become, 
the triumphs she will win when her days of 
studentship are past. 

But it is not of the power of an invisible 
ideal I would specially have you think now; 
it is of the power of an unseen reality. What 
most commonly holds every man and woman 
of us to courage, perseverance, sacrifice, the 
drab commonplaces of hard work and weari- 
ness for which we get so little tangible profit? 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 105 

Is it not the vision of our homes? But I remind 
you that the home is always invisible except 
to the insight of the sympathetic spirit. Any- 
one can see the house, the furniture, the broken 
toys left in an ugly litter here and there, the 
stained rug or the burned floor beside the 
hearth, the queer, old-fashioned pictures some- 
times upon the walls — anyone can see that. 
But the home is something which escapes the 
eye. Only those who have the inner vision can 
perceive it; but to them that room is not simply 
four walls and some photographs and some odd 
chairs and a bed; it is the place where a sister 
died. The broken toys, to them, are not a litter; 
they are the footprints of a priceless childhood 
scattering along its way the light which all 
too soon will pass. Those queer pictures, to 
such as have the gift of sight, are the voices of 
dear spirits speaking from their graves the end- 
less affection which makes our life a majesty 
and a mighty hope. You cannot see any of 
that unless you have the vision. 

The principle holds good, as well, for the 
personalities involved. Few men have ever 
been able to perceive what a bride sees in her 
husband; and a similar incapacity of sight not 
infrequently characterizes the feminine friends 
of the bridegroom as regards his appraisal of 
the bride. You cannot read Boswell often 



106 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

enough to take away your wonder at Johnson's 
marriage. The lady who became his wife was 
a widow when he courted her. She was twenty 
years older than he which, perhaps, is not so 
remarkable as the fact that he discovered it. 
She was not good to look at, being, as David 
Garrick reported, very fat, with "swelled cheeks, 
of a florid red produced by thick painting and 
increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring 
and fantastic in her dress, and affected both 
in her speech and her general behavior." That 
was what contemporaries saw. But Johnson 
himself, the greatest literary figure of his cen- 
tury, if not of all the centuries since Shake- 
speare, lived in pride and happiness with her, 
and after her death, through long years, alike 
of struggle and success, of poverty and afflu- 
ence, cherished her memory with a devotion 
almost unsurpassed in domestic history. He 
saw the invisible realities of a supreme affec- 
tion; and in her lifetime it was his home with 
her, to us uncongenial and unlovely, in his 
widowhood his memory of her, that wrought 
the higher and holier reenforcements of his 
lonely and melancholy life. It is a history in 
which we all participate, for it is that spiritual 
reality of home, in which every stick of furni- 
ture, every picture, every casual implement of 
domesticity, is drenched with the lives of those 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 107 

we love, which holds us, common men and 
women, to the relentless tasks of our toilsome 
and monotonous lives. 

There is another invisible, in the sight of 
which men and women endure; it is the church. 
Anybody can see a church building; and mostly 
that is all the crowd sees. We go to church 
dedications and make much over new organs, 
stained-glass windows, innovations or revivals 
in architecture, and the like. But no one was 
ever greatly sustained by the things thus seen. 
There is a deeper, a mystic but majestic reality. 
I remember standing in a London hallway an 
hour, perhaps, after midnight, while around us 
shrapnel was falling from anti-aircraft guns, 
and the roar of German airplanes could now 
and then be heard above us through the deto- 
nation of bombs that were wrecking London 
blocks. The Germans were raiding the city. 
A splendid English woman, not excited, for she 
had seen much service in military hospitals and 
had been through many an air-raid, but deeply 
affected, was saying over and over, "O I hope 
they do not hit the Abbey." I introduced some 
relevant but trivial remark and she replied 
with real anguish in her voice, "I'd die gladly 
if it would save the Abbey from destruction." 
And as we talked she went on to say: "You 
may not understand it, for you are not an 



108 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Englishman, but Westminster Abbey is all our 
English history. It means all of our past to us. 
It is the mausoleum of our great dead and the 
very soul of our spiritual England." There are 
tens of thousands of tourists who see the Abbey, 
who look curiously at its tombs and say trite 
things in Poets' Corner; but only a spirit sym- 
pathetic with a gigantic past can see in that 
great pile the soul of England. In like fashion 
the church appears to some of us. Any stran- 
ger, any man, however irreligious he may be, 
can see the structure of a building, can attend 
the dedication of an edifice, can go through 
the customary forms of worship. But we have 
the church, not a building made with hands, 
but an awesome, tender, sustaining, spiritual 
fact; speaking hope from its symbolic altars 
and comfort from its fellowships and power 
from visible ceremonies. It is to us something 
of the life of eternity in the field of time. And 
the great multitude of us, for all the humanness 
of the organic institution, the failure of some of 
its leaders, the confusion of some of its voices, 
the cheapness of some of its moods, neverthe- 
less find in it a grip and reality as unmistakable 
as they are mysterious. We see the invisible, 
the body of which Christ is the head. 

So our homes and our church reenforce us. 
We endure the slavish labor of monotonous 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 109 

days, the battle with beleaguerments and com- 
petitions, with disillusionments, antagonisms, 
and betrayals; because of the inner world our 
love creates, and, in turn, has created around 
it. We endure the struggle for ideals, the beat 
of temptation, the moral failures and the in- 
adequate and painful and sometimes thwarting 
returns of good intents, because of that better 
world of the spirit our worship finds and our 
church expresses. We endure, according to our 
besetments, seeing that which is invisible. 

II 

But, if one shall look ever so casually at 
this text, he will discern that it is saying nothing 
about invisible things, nothing about mere ideals 
and orders of the spirit, as such. It does not 
read that this man of whom it speaks endured 
as seeing what is invisible. Doubtless that is 
true enough; and it may be worth our effort 
to look, as we pass, at what he endured; but he 
saw far more than a What; he saw a Who. 

Moses is the man; and what did he endure? 
Born in a peasant's hut and saved in infancy 
from violent death by the faithfulness of his 
mother, he was bred to tumult. Reared, 
through his parents' cunning, in the palace of 
the Egyptian king, he was familiar with the 
riches of an empire, the pomps of state, the pride 



110 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

of royalty, the cruelty of power. Yet his 
peasant birth had given him that sympathy for 
toiling men that marks the common man; the 
favorite of oppressors, he rebelled against op- 
pression; and when not even forty years in 
the king's household could protect him from 
the anger of the court, it is written that he 
fled in fear and, from a prince of the realm, 
became a shepherd on the hills of Midian. Here, 
in other words, is a man suddenly thrown out 
from the center of the world's momentous life 
into the loneliness of a mean and obscure task; 
a man who had known the dignities of position 
and the privileges of power become a day laborer 
with nothing left but the memories of a brilliant 
past and the uncertainties of a precarious future. 
Many men have been flung into that same ex- 
perience; reversals of fortune are among the 
commonest features of biography. But com- 
paratively few men have driven steadily on to 
such an imperial vindication as Moses won; 
no other man has passed through his obscurity 
to the universal service Moses wrought. George 
Matheson has a paragraph of characteristic 
insight in his analysis of Moses's character 
and work, saying that the sphere in which 
Moses stands alone is "in the discovery that 
common life may be religious life. That God 
was in the garden, men knew; that God was in 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 111 

the sanctuary, men knew; that God was beside 
the altar, men knew. But that God should be 
in secular places, that the home itself should be 
a sanctuary, that the household fire should be 
an altar fire, that the honoring of a human 
parent should be deemed an act of piety, that 
the observance of a neighbor's rights should 
be esteemed one of the rites of worship — this 
was a new departure in the religious life of man." 1 

The explanation of this power and revelation 
of Moses is, of course, in the words of the text, 
which were written of him, and which mean, as 
Dr. Matheson again remarks with spiritual pre- 
cision, that "Moses kept his humanitarian im- 
pulse in the absence of human motives — kept 
it in spite of silence and solitude, kept it when 
the sands of life were low." 

With some variations of detail but the same 
obligations of principle it is that same high 
responsibility and need which rest upon men 
and women to-day. We have to keep not only 
our humanitarian, but our religious impulse in 
the absence of many of our older human and 
religious motives. We have to keep our im- 
pulse toward Christian brotherhood and the 
kingdom of God on earth, when men, as never 
before, are separated sharply into classes and 
groups, warring to the death; when the world 

1 Representative Men of the Bible; vol. i, p. 199. 



112 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

shakes with the crash of civil strifes; when the 
structure of human institutions — governments, 
industries, social organs, society itself — seems 
trembling on the rim of ruin amid the fierce, 
hot hates of men raging against one another in 
suicidal enmities. We have to keep our impulse 
toward law and the ordered conduct of life 
under its dispassionate control, when, on every 
side, the clamorous voices of the multitudes are 
shouting against order, and in the laws whose 
beneficence for generations has made the sta- 
bility of society, are claiming to discover the 
sources of those injustices against which the 
last recourse is riot. We have to maintain that 
impulse toward law, when the expression of 
law has too often sprung from anything but 
patriotic motives, and the administration of it 
has been too often the confirmation of wrong by 
the very instruments designed for its suppres- 
sion. We have to keep our impulse toward 
faith, toward worship, toward the very activi- 
ties and experiences of religion, when on every 
wind there blows the challenge that our faith 
has been only a tradition and an error, that our 
worship has proved futile where it has not been 
insincere, that our experiences have been selfish 
and unsocial when they have not been halluci- 
nations, that our activities have been useless 
where they have not been misdirected; that our 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 113 

religion itself has broken beneath the assaults 
of a practical life too real to be met with the 
superstitions of the past and the sentimentalities 
of the present. You may translate all that into 
whatever variations of detail you please, but 
there is the duty which our delirious and be- 
wildered time sets before every honest Christian; 
there is the labor of mind and spirit which 
to-day appoints to every man and woman of us 
in our own experience and opportunity, how- 
ever narrowed and domestic our particular lives 
may seem to be^ If religion is once more to 
grip society as a leading and a restraint; if the 
church is once again to lift the multitudes to 
aspirations higher than the day's bread and 
the night's luxury, it will not be because con- 
ferences, commissions, federations, and the like 
make programs and organize movements and 
maintain propaganda; it will be because men 
and women, living their own lives, doing their 
own work, bearing their own burdens and fight- 
ing their own battles, become once more the 
salt of the earth and the light of the world by 
walking circumspectly toward them that are 
without, redeeming the time. It will be be- 
cause common Christians, here and there and 
everywhere, regain and republish those stu- 
pendous certainties of the spirit by which, in 
other times and among other tumults of social 



114 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

peril and social ill, the fear and the love of God 
were brought home to confused and quarrel- 
some generations. And if any shall be asking 
how that is to be done, rather, how we are to 
do our part in that imminent and imperative 
task, the answer is here. As Moses served his 
day, we, also, must endure as seeing, not merely 
that which, but Him who is invisible. We must 
recover the vision of God. We must regain 
that sustaining insight which sees Him in the 
web and woof of all our madly woven life; 
which sees Him in the shadows, not merely 
keeping watch above his own, but through the 
passions and the pain of men, in spite of their 
rebellions and their will to wrong, shaping the 
growing structure of that impregnable spiritual 
order which one day shall be his kingdom come 
on earth as it is in heaven. 



HI 

The difficulty in our way, and the funda- 
mental peril of our present-day religious and 
social thinking, is the seeming unreality of God. 
Step by step our advancing knowledge has re- 
vealed the hollowness of those appearances 
which, in more primitive days, were taken for 
unmistakable indications of his presence. Once 
the thunder was his voice; now it is the rush 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 115 

of air to fill a vacuum. Once the lightning was 
his spear; now it is an automatic electrical dis- 
charge. Once the tempest was his besom 
sweeping penalty upon a province or a city, 
now it is a fortuitous combination of tempera- 
tures. Once a pestilence was the stroke of his 
anger; now it is a release of bacteria by a process 
of fermentation. In similar fashion the inner 
experiences of men which our fathers used to 
account as the direct impress of the Almighty, 
the movement of his Spirit, are become reckon- 
able reactions of nervous and mental states; 
and what were once the joys and sorrows, the 
triumphs and defeats of the soul in conflict 
with personal evil or conquest of personal good, 
are too easily considered but the products of 
temperament depending on the operation of 
gastric juices or the distribution of blood- 
vessels toward the brain. 

No illustrations are required to emphasize 
the apparent unreality of God in the life of 
society and the conduct of our common affairs. 
The business of the world is managed con- 
tinually as if there were no God whatever. 
The inexorable procession of its events — catas- 
trophe, war, revolution, pestilence — the pro- 
digious evil of a history that marches on the 
miseries of humankind — all proceed with not 
a sign to indicate a God involved. If there is 



116 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

a God, then the cry of the multitudes of men 
is the cry of the psalmist centuries ago: 

"Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? 
Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble ?" 

Our first obligation and privilege is to redis- 
cover the reality of the unseen God, and we shall 
do that, not by logic but by life; not by rein- 
terpreting theology but by renewing experi- 
ence. You can never find any of these invisible 
realities to which I have been referring except 
in this fashion. You cannot see a home, but 
you can live in it. You cannot demonstrate 
the spiritual presence of the church, but you 
can pray at its altars, be subdued by its sacra- 
ments, and feel the uplift and consolation of 
its mystic power. We shall rediscover the 
reality of God in no other way. He is invisible, 
but he is; and we shall prove his presence, not 
by observation of the appearances but by ad- 
venture on the fact. 

Moreover, this endurance of which the text 
speaks, it needs hardly be said, and the en- 
durance which the world needs now from us, 
is not merely an accepting of the ills of life, 
an acquiescence in the inevitable. There are 
men who take the bludgeonings of the world as 
an ox takes blows or a tree receives a tempest — 
because they cannot do anything else. This 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 117 

Christian endurance which will rehabilitate the 
spiritual fiber of society is a positive thing. 
It is endurance plus. It has a tonic quality; 
and at the heart of it is a strain of song. It 
is a spirit facing the world as General Foch 
faced the German III Army at the Marne, 
when by every visible criterion of judgment he 
and with him the entire French forces were on 
the edge of imminent collapse, and who reported 
to General Joffre, "The situation is developing 
satisfactorily." And that tonic endurance in 
the whirl of life to-day is possible only as by 
adventure on the fact, despite appearances, we 
apprehend the reality of a very present God. 

How, then, to come toward the end of the 
sermon, will this apprehension of God empower 
us to endure? What will this insight into the 
invisible reality do for us? First of all, it will 
dissipate the pessimism which is sapping our 
confidence in life and society to-day. Writing 
of one of the mediaeval generations, Henry 
Adams has said that "the deepest expression of 
social feeling ended with the word 'Despair.' ' 
That is threatening to be the situation with us. 
Europe in confusion and misery! America in 
tumult! The Orient fermenting with renascent 
unrest ! The idealism which we had thought so 
opulent during the war bankrupted by the 
revelation of uninterrupted and unblushing in- 



118 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

trigue! That is the day in which we are living. 
There is a gray, bleak tone in our social think- 
ing; a hollow note in the propaganda of recon- 
struction. Are we not perhaps upon the 
threshold of that dissolution which ended, one 
after another, the civilizations of the past? It 
takes little study to realize that nothing of our 
own constructions will exclude that pessimism. 
Programs, organizations, Leagues of Nations — 
none of these can be more than an expedient. 
We must have something utterly fundamental 
and unmistakably trustworthy. We must see 
at the heart of life something greater than life, 
that we may know beyond our doubting that 
the urgencies of the world are swinging to 
constraints far greater than its tumults. This 
apprehended reality of the unseen but immanent 
God gives us that victorious certainty. 

And all is well though faith and form 
Be sundered in the night of fear; 
Well roars the storm to those that hear 

A deeper voice across the storm. 

"The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom 
shall I be afraid?" 

Again, this insight into the reality of the 
invisible God will strengthen us against ac- 
cepting our own moral failure. There has been 
for a long time a growing evil in modern life; 
namely, that men have been minimizing evil 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 119 

itself, that sin has been losing its impress of 
sinfulness, that our conscience has been dulled 
toward the recognition of our wrongfulness. 
We do well to guard firmly against that, for it 
is still true, as Walter Bagehot said, that so 
long as men are very imperfect, the sense of 
great imperfection should cleave to them. But 
there is another danger to which the temper of 
the day contributes. It is the danger that men 
shall accept their imperfections, with all their 
imperfectness, as the normal, to-be-expected 
thing. I am not sure that the greater tragedy 
of personal sin is, not that one does it, but that 
he comes to think he cannot do anything else. 
In these sifting, searching, groping days we 
have to come back to the elder assurance that 
sin hath no more dominion over us; and we 
shall come back to that assurance only as we 
shall see, contemporaneous with our sin, the 
strength of a present God. We have never yet 
conquered our sin? Be it so; neither have we 
gotten rid of God; and the one reality is far 
more durable than the other. I grant you the 
paradox; but an English theologian wrote a 
few years ago that if we are ever to be in right 
relation to God, it must be now amid our sin. 
And the truth of the paradox goes far back of 
an English theologian; it is in Saint John's 
unfathomable declaration that "Hereby shall 



120 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

we know that we are of the truth, and shall 
assure our heart before him. For if our heart 
condemn us, God is greater than our heart and 
knoweth all things." We can endure, unde- 
feated, unyielding, undismayed, our moral fail- 
ure, as seeing Him who is invisible and knoweth 
even our heart. 

And, finally, this insight into the reality of 
the presence of the invisible God will sustain 
us amid the tragedies of life to which all flesh 
is heir. That is the tritest subject of preach- 
ing, but at the same time it is the freshest, for 
the agonies of men are original every day. 
Loss, pain, sorrow are the sure partners of life, 
as inexorable as the Greek Fates. Now abideth 
not only faith, hope, and charity, but loss, pain, 
and sorrow; and amid the tide, or tempest, or 
miasma of their presence, men and women 
need more than the support of comradeship 
and courage. In one of the accounts of the last 
days of the Czar Nicholas, in a paragraph 
describing his life as a prisoner at Tsarkoe is 
a simple remark to the effect that, bending over 
his flower beds, he forgot his troubles. What 
a hollow falsehood that is! I venture that, 
bending over his flower beds, the Czar saw in 
every drooping blossom the fading of his royal 
dreams, in every heap of fallen petals the ruins 
of his empire. Men do not forget trouble; 



THE VISION THAT SUSTAINS 121 

they sometimes learn to use it. But if, in such 
events, they are to stand and serve and hope, 
they must see far deeper than the transient 
stream of things and life. It is by this sight 
of Him who is invisible, this apprehension by 
adventure, of the sure presence of God him- 
self, that we shall come to be masters of our 
passion and proprietors of our grief; learning 
by the things which we suffer to be serviceable 
to the day in which we live. We sing with a 
true emotion a hymn with this petition: 

"0 strengthen me, that while I stand 
Firm on the rock, and strong in thee, 
I may stretch out a loving hand 
To wrestlers with the troubled sea." 

It is a good prayer, but we must answer it for 
ourselves; and we shall answer it only as, out 
of our own experiences, we bring to others the 
realization of our victory; only as our own ad- 
venture has given us that practiced insight 
which sees the invisible God as the unfailing 
companion of our troubled lives. 

There is darkness drifting across the face 
of life from the confusion of a groping and 
bewildered generation. The world has seemed 
bereft of these elder Providences which once 
bore witness to a Divine Presence and purpose 
in the affairs of men. But God, nevertheless, 
is. There could be no emptiness like the absence 



122 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

of God, no wounds so deep and fatal as the hurts 
that follow on the loss of faith. 

"But where will God be absent? In his face 
Is light, but in his shadow healing, too." 

In our darkest hours we may "touch the shadow 
and be healed," learning to endure as we see 
Him who is invisible. 



V 

THE GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 



The Lord is King, be the people never so 
impatient: 

He sitteth between the cherubims, be the 
earth never so unquiet. — Psalm 99. 1. 



THE GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 

One of our Methodist bishops is credited 
with the remark that Bible passages ought to 
be stamped like some railway tickets, "Not 
good if detached." It is an observation at 
once clever and profound, for there is no more 
fruitful source of bad theology and no more 
treacherous foundation for personal faith, than 
misunderstood Scripture; and frequently a 
verse or paragraph which seems to quicken and 
sustain the spirit as by the immediate revela- 
tion of the truth of God, means something far 
different from its surface inference, and can 
be understood only through patient and thor- 
ough exploration of its broad and progressive 
context. I have not been able to forget the 
bishop's words as I have thought upon this 
verse which I have read as the text for the 
morning. Because you will not find it, in this 
language, in either your King James or your 
Revised Version. In the American Revised 
Version it reads like this: 
"Jehovah reigneth; let the people tremble: 
He sitteth above the cherubim; let the earth 
be moved." 

The language as I read it is from the old 
125 



126 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

English Prayer-book version of, say 1549; and 
to come to it intelligently is to take a long and 
illuminating journey down a spacious and 
heroic past. To see this version of the text 
in its own setting would be to stand yonder in 
sixteenth-century England; it is to watch the 
progress of the German Reformation widen- 
ing in continental Europe, and dragged across 
the English Channel to legalize the lust of 
Henry VIII. If you had stood beside this 
version of the text in its own day, you would 
have seen the proud and bitter pageantry of 
English queens coming, each with high hope 
and something of maiden love, and something 
of the mounting pride of personal ambition, to 
share the splendors of the greatest court in 
Christendom; and then, after a few brilliant, 
disappointing years or months, passing, broken- 
hearted, to the loneliness of divorce or the 
agony of the block; the bridal days of Catherine 
of Arragon and Anne of Cleves changed to 
the bitterness of their humiliated lives, the 
wedding finery of Anne Boleyn and Catherine 
Howard forgotten as they knelt on Tower 
Green to die. You can see through this old 
version the fall of Wolsey, and Thomas Crom- 
well, and Norfolk, and catch a glimpse of Will 
Shakespeare coming up to London town a few 
years later, to bewitch the world for all sue- 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 127 

ceeding time. This old version is rich with 
memories of Cardinal Fisher and Thomas More 
going to their death to keep their conscience 
clear. Over it, had you been there, you might 
have seen the flickering light flung from the 
martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley, burned in 
Oxford in that widening conflagration which 
wrought Protestantism into the very heart of 
England. When you read this version, if you 
have a memory for the mighty and tragic past, 
you will see beside it the figure of the man 
who had most, perhaps, to do with its making, 
time-serving, self-seeking, temporizing Thomas 
Cranmer, archbishop by grace of Henry VIIFs 
adulterous favor; yet, in the providence of God, 
making stupendous contribution to the Pro- 
testant cause, laying solid intellectual founda- 
tions for the Reformation in England, and, in 
the hour of his own downfall and tragedy, 
rising to his supreme height and burning at 
the stake with all his cowardly weakness and 
evil compromises lost in the heroism of his 
death. If we could not detach this version of 
the text from all with which it is involved, we 
would stand . engulfed in the mighty, many- 
colored panorama of the sixteenth century. 

Now, I did not find it there. I found it in a 
context quite different, but as splendid as ever 
Henry dominated or Cranmer transformed; for I 



128 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

came across this version of the text on Memorial 
Day of 1918, as I was riding in an army Ford 
from one of our American camps near Win- 
chester, England, to Southampton, a few miles 
away. I remember yet that it was a wonderful 
evening after a day of stirring events; and as 
we rode, we were looking out over the dreaming 
English landscape, catching here a glimpse of 
that gray old cathedral at whose altars King 
Canute hung up his crown, Alfred the Great 
had worshiped, and near the site of which the 
legends tell that King Arthur kept his fabled 
court. Yonder were quiet villages, and there 
the sinister camps, and around us the purple 
twilight was creeping down the lovely English 
lanes. Through the stillness above us came 
the dim roar of a flying plane, in the distance 
the music of a bugle, and as we listened to its 
wailing echoes an army car went whirling by. 
Upon us, meanwhile, hung a heavy, formless 
fear we did not confess; for across the Chan- 
nel had come the news of the German hosts 
hammering once more on their way to Paris, 
with French divisions in retreat, and English 
regiments battered, driven, and unable to re- 
form, till the line was trembling to disorder 
and every hour seemed about to fling out upon 
the world the desperate word that the front 
was broken and the Germans had won through. 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 129 

Chateau-Thierry had not yet seen the wonder 
of American resistance; Belleau Wood had not 
yet told the metal of the marines; all we knew 
was that the hour was great with destiny, that 
German shells were falling in the heart of Paris, 
and the German lines were less than fifty miles 
away. It was then as we rode, that the man 
who was with me, who was leading the singing 
in some of the camps, said, "I've found a verse 
I want you to read," and he handed me his 
psalter and I read there, in the fading twilight, 
with that great, aching, unnamed fear at my 
heart, these words : 

"The Lord is King, be the people never so im- 
patient : 
He sitteth between the cherubims, be the earth 
never so unquiet." 

And I confess that I like that context. I have 
no doubt that the scholarship of 1611 which 
produced the King James Version, and to a 
much greater extent the scholarship of 1881 
was more precise than that which made this 
prayer-book of Edward VI. I am quite 
sure that the conscience of the revisers, their 
conviction as to social morality, the consis- 
tency of their religious profession with their 
common practice, were more sound and spirit- 
ual than those exhibited by Thomas Cranmer, 



130 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

in the great days of his temptation and his 
power. And I do not question but that the 
language of the revision more nearly approxi- 
mates the meaning of the Hebrew psalmist 
than does this older version. But this older 
version found me, as Coleridge said of the Bible 
as a whole, and found me at greater depth than 
do these later readings. I appreciate the austere 
meaning of the line here as I read it in our 
common version: "Jehovah reigneth; let the 
people tremble." But we were trembling on 
that Memorial Day because we were half afraid 
that Jehovah was not reigning; it looked like 
Apollyon triumphant. There is unmistakable 
pomp and appeal and beauty in this declaration 
that "He sitteth above the cherubim; let the 
earth be moved." But on that May Day the 
earth was moved as never in its history, because 
men could not see God sitting yonder where the 
smoke of battle darkened their hope of all good 
things. This old version, then, came home to 
the heart of us like an aria from the Redemp- 
tion. The important fact is not the trembling 
of the peoples; the determining fact is not the 
moving of the earth; the important, the deter- 
mining fact is the enduring, immeasurable, in- 
effable experience of humanity that, unshaken 
by the tramp of roaring armies, unstartled by 
the convulsion of the continents, the Lord is 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 131 

King, enthroned among the immanent realities 
of the world. 

But even so, I would not dare to bring this 
text to-day if it were appropriate only to a 
time of war. For the hour when I discovered 
this particular version has long since gone. 
The German hosts long since went reeling back 
in disarray, and the guns that thundered then 
around the ramparts of the Marne have been 
silent now these swiftly passing months, and 
over that still lovely English landscape the 
wailing horns no longer sound. But the peoples 
are trembling yet; the earth is still moved; we 
are impatient as never before, and our world 
was never more unquiet. The unquenched 
passions of men, the fevers of old hates and new 
ambitions, the frenzies born of ignorance and 
the fears that spring from partial knowledge; 
the bitterness of class divisions and the strife 
that festers out of ancient wrongs; the cruelty 
of power and the recklessness of despair, all 
are whirling across the landscape of society 
at large in recurrent storms. Over seas armies 
are still marching; yesterday the eastern battle 
front was alive with fire. Revolution, famine, 
death still hold their carnival among the rem- 
nants of once splendid nations. Here at home 
law hangs in the balance; our institutions shake 
amid the turbulence of disordered industry, 



132 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

while the weakness of government is reacting 
in popular contempt for its instruments and 
popular skepticism of its aims. What exegetes 
may be here will forgive me if my heart still 
goes back beyond the literal precision of more 
exacting present-day scholarship, to build my 
hope and confidence upon the message of this 
old version, deep-rooted in a remote but equally 
tumultuous day. 

"The Lord is King, be the people never so 
impatient : 
He sitteth between the cherubims, be the earth 
never so unquiet." 



But it goes almost without saying that, 
though this sixteenth-century language and 
imagery grip us at spiritual depths, we cannot 
look through them and see God as the sixteenth 
century saw him. We cannot think of him as 
that splendid, nation-building Protestantism 
which grew out of the English Reformation 
thought of him. For theological conceptions 
take form and color from human institutions 
and experience, and the conception of God as 
a monarch enthroned among the majesties, and 
from his immeasurable magnificence ruling a 
subject world, was the product of the world's 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 133 

age-long experience of human tyranny. The 
psalmists, in their most exalted moods, and 
Jesus always, rooted their conception in a still 
more ancient institution, that of parenthood, 
saying that God was like a father pitying his 
children, and that the supreme revelation of 
the divine character was through his incarna- 
tion as the Son. But millenniums had gone to 
the evolution of the idea of God as king, and 
the idea has been terribly tenacious. Even 
to-day, with the kingly ideal crumbled beyond 
repair, and the long procession of monarchs, 
who once filled the world with majesties and 
pomps, dwindled to a few mild figures who at 
most are but the fading shadows of a reality 
that has passed, even to-day the King idea is 
still alive and the Father idea of God has not 
effectively seized the world. If it had, if men 
everywhere realized and lived upon the realiza- 
tion that God is our Father, the social storms 
that sweep us would be quiet as the waves that 
fell before the word of Christ on wind-vexed 
Galilee. If the world lived upon the fact of 
the Fatherhood of God, we would know, with 
an immeasurable joy and confidence, that of 
his dominion even now there can be neither 
end nor interruption. 

The great experience and institution and 
passion of humanity to-day is not kingship, but 



134 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

at the same time it is not parenthood; it is 
what men call, glibly enough, democracy. Of 
course, it does not take any argument to show 
that we have no clearly defined and satisfactory 
apprehension of what democracy is. Lloyd 
George, Clemenceau, and President Wilson 
would not agree on its practical terms. Gover- 
nor Allen and Mr. Gompers could never get 
together on it. Once upon a time it meant "a 
people ruling"; now it can be described in 
many quarters as a mob rioting. Once it 
meant the ordered judgment of the majority; 
in not a few instances lately it has seemed to 
be the wild passions of the minority. Theoreti- 
cally it was once believed to be the will of the 
most, expressed through the competent, for 
the good of all; but we can recall, with no effort, 
some recent occasions when it has looked like 
the will of the few, pursued by the inefficient, 
for the gratification of some. But deeper than 
these partial and prejudiced expressions, the 
conception of democracy itself remains and is 
expanding into a racial passion, and our theology 
must speak in terms of contemporary life. Now, 
the heart of democracy is not that kings shall 
be abolished, but that they shall participate 
in the common experience. You cannot see 
God as the sixteenth century, or the seven- 
teenth, or the eighteenth century saw him — 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 135 

stern, implacable, autocratic, surrounded by 
the infinite ornamentation congenial to an 
Oriental mind, and ruling from an awful throne 
the capricious conduct of a predetermined 
world. You cannot see him as even the nine- 
teenth century saw him, a Judge haling hu- 
manity to a bar of justice whose procedure, 
principles, and laws, over which humanity 
itself had no choice, foredoomed it to convic- 
tion for crimes to which, by birth, it had been 
inescapably predestined. However we may 
cling, in the feeling of our own security, to the 
comfortable imagery of God the Autocrat mak- 
ing the wrath of man to praise him, ordering 
the steps of a good man, keeping the deaths 
of his saints precious, and the like you cannot 
unerringly fit that imagery into the hard facts 
of contemporary experience. It is not God 
sitting above the world with poised thunder- 
bolts and hidden providences, a baptized Jove, 
that will speak to our intelligent devotion now; 
it is God somehow battling together with men, 
struggling in their struggles, suffering in their 
agonies, delayed in their defeats, victorious in 
their moral triumphs. The democratical prin- 
ciples which, during the French Revolution, 
Gibbon said "lead by a path of flowers into 
the abyss of hell," are now leading by a path 
of thorns and crosses toward the very heights 



136 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

of God. It is not the God of things as they 
ought to be, separated from men by infinite 
and imperial power, who is to guarantee our 
certitude and hope; it is the God of things as 
they are, the great Democrat, identified with 
men in an infinite sympathy and fellowship. 
He is not an absolute monarch, disassociated 
from the movement of events, and to be re- 
vealed only in the victorious denouement of 
history; he is the vast participant in all the 
tragic and laborious progress by which it comes. 
And lest you should think this some new 
bolshevism breaking over into homiletics, I 
remind you that it is not any modern adventure 
in interpretation; it is the profound and sus- 
taining confidence in history and life breathed 
through revelation since Isaiah and his people's 
tragic experience. "In all their affliction he 
was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved 
them." This is the premise of a most critical 
and subtle philosophy, as for instance Mr. A. 
J. Balfour, in his lectures before the University 
of Glasgow, saying, "When ... I speak of God, 
... I mean a God . . . who takes sides." 1 This 
is the stupendous meaning of Christianity in 
the sublime episode from which historically it 
flows. The crucifixion of Jesus, is it not the 
supreme revelation of God, sympathetic with 

1 Theism and Humanism, p. 36, George H. Doran Company, Publishers. 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 137 

and laboring together with men? For, as Princi- 
pal Forsyth has reminded us, Jesus "was not cru- 
cified in the sky as a spectacle, but as the result of 
a very concrete national situation, which he did 
not shirk, and did much to create." 2 And when 
you read Saint Paul saying that in Christ "were 
all things created, in the heavens and upon the 
earth, things visible and things invisible, 
whether thrones or dominions, or principali- 
ties or powers; all things have been created 
through him and unto him; and he is before 
all things, and in him all things consist," I 
say that when you read those spacious words, 
you do no violence to Scripture to see in them 
not simply some religious or theological mean- 
ing, but a profound social significance as well. 
I am aware that we have yet to fit the literal 
language of this text to this democratic con- 
struction of modern ideas. How can one warm 
his feelings at the thought that the Lord is 
King, be the peoples never so impatient, if, in 
truth, the Lord is a great Democrat, involved 
in the struggles and toils of the multitude? 
How can one build his hope upon the conviction 
that God is enthroned, how can you even think 
of God as being enthroned, if he is fighting side 
by side with us in the serious and unfeigned 
battle o f a progressive humankind? The ques- 

2 The Christian Ethics of War, Longmans, Green & Co., Publishers. 



138 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

tions are natural enough, but they rise from a 
confusion of thought. We ask them because 
we have confused the kingly place with the 
kingly character. Those often-quoted words 
of John Richard Green on Alfred the Great 
will suggest a clue. "He is," said Green, "the 
first instance in the history of Christendom of 
a ruler who put aside every personal aim or 
ambition to devote himself wholly to the wel- 
fare of those whom he ruled." He is not the 
last instance. Brand Whitlock has described 
the dramatic scene when Belgium decided to 
resist the Germans' passage through to the 
French frontier, and in the Belgian Parliament, 
the king, uniformed and spurred, his saber 
clanking at his side, strode to the rostrum, while 
the streets outside thundered their applause, 
and inside, the chamber echoed with acclama- 
tion. It was a great and inspiring scene when 
Albert, as we say, every inch a king, announced 
the determination to command the country 
into conflict. That was the king's place. But 
Albert was never so much the king as when, 
in the mire and cold of bitter winter, he endured 
the hardships of his soldiers in the field, suffer- 
ing as they suffered, desiring as they desired, 
fighting as they fought. Belgium never knew 
its affection for the throne, or the power of 
the throne to command and color its imagina- 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 139 

tion, its allegiance, its very life, as it knew it 
when that throne was empty, and the monarch 
was down among the men-at-arms, dressed as 
they were dressed and a participant in all the 
adventure of their embattled lives. Albert 
had not changed his character; he had simply 
changed his place. When I say, then, that 
God is the Great Democrat, the God of things 
as they are, I do not mean that he is less a 
King; I mean — and this is the mood of Chris- 
tianity to-day — that the King has come upon 
the battlefield. Democracy has captured reli- 
gion and the thrones are gone, but He who gave 
the throne its meaning remains. We have lost 
the spectacular paraphernalia of an older the- 
ology; but the God who then seemed spectacular 
is now practical. As men never realized before, 
he is Immanuel, God with us. 

II 

I think it will be granted now that this 
conviction that in some way God is with us in 
the struggle of life, not merely in the personal 
struggle, the warfare of flesh and spirit upon 
the battlefields of the individual soul, but that 
God is with us in the conflict of society, the 
development of the nation, the labor of the 
race, for social justice, for truth, for collective 
tenderness, for rightly organized industry and 



140 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

the stewardship of possession and power — 
this conviction that God is thus with us conies 
as a very healing assurance. "If God be for us, 
who can be against us?" But in the face of 
that conviction — just because of it, perhaps — 
we may easily fall into either of two misconcep- 
tions. 

For instance, it is very easy to slip into the 
feeling that because God is with the right, the 
right will come to pass, in spite of everything, 
and therefore, we need not engage ourselves 
inconveniently in the contest to bring it to 
pass. One of the dearest memories I have is 
of my mother's unshakable faith in God, as 
she took this simple, unquestioning attitude 
toward the future. When there were hard 
times in our parsonage home — and there were 
more of that kind than of any other — when 
the paying members kept the financial expres- 
sion of their religious experience under splendid 
control and practiced conservation on the 
preacher's salary; when the Conference wheel, 
or the exigencies of an unpopular pastorate, or 
the total depravity of the appointing power, 
wrought that bitterness of experience which 
only the itinerant preacher's family on small 
income knows; when debt haunted the house 
like some evil genius, withering my father's 
cheerfulness and deadening all zest in life, 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 141 

many is the time I have heard my mother sing- 
ing at her work, with a very tired heart, but 
singing, to the tune of "How Firm a Founda- 
tion!" an old hymn with the repeated line "The 
Lord will provide." And many a time I have 
heard her say to her sons or to her husband, 
"Well, it will all come out right in the end." 
No one can ever dull the beauty of that sort 
of faith while I remember her; but that sort 
of faith may, nevertheless, become a peril as 
well as a splendor to the soul. One may come 
to be so sure of God that he omits himself. He 
may be so certain that God will win through 
that he himself takes no part in the adventure. 
It is worth inquiring whether this is not the 
deeper reason lying beneath the church's failure 
in the past to enter energetically into what 
we now know as the social struggle; for clean 
politics, for industrial righteousness, for social 
hygiene, for the abolition of poverty, and the 
like. Religious men and women did not deny 
the evil of conditions as they existed, but they 
intuitively felt that "it would all come right in 
the end," and meanwhile, religion, as they con- 
ceived it, was to keep itself unspotted from the 
world. 

There is another peril, closely akin to this 
one; namely, that because God is with the right, 
one will underestimate the reality of the conflict 



142 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

for righteousness, in which he is to take his 
part. One of the stories told of Joan of x\rc 
is of her appearance before Charles IX to ask 
for his cooperation and assuring him of success, 
because, as she said, God had promised to give 
her victory. And Charles, so the tale tells, 
asked her, "But if God gives the victory, why 
do you need an army?" And the Maid replied, 
"Ah, Sire, God indeed giveth the victory, but 
men must fight." I do not presume to say what 
meaning was in the Maid's mind, but there is 
no doubt that many a modern Christian who 
is sure that God will give the victory has the 
complacent, if unrecognized, feeling that the 
fight is only a moral gesture, that it is only 
for the fighter's sake, that it is of no importance 
in winning the victory but only in exercising 
the fighter, and that ultimately God will give 
the victory, and the fighter will discover in a 
placid heaven that the fight was a bit of gym- 
nastics to fit him for a restful paradise. That 
is not a new feeling. It is that fallacy which 
lurks in Milton's noblest sonnet; where, as he 
broods upon his blindness, he represents Pa- 
tience as replying to his complaints: 
"God doth not need 
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best 
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best." 

That is a conclusion congenial to Milton's Puri- 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 143 

tan, predestination conception of God as sitting 
remotely on a sovereign throne and moving 
the events of men to a predetermined end. 
But Milton's conduct was truer than his creed; 
for he fought the fight for God and England 
as though God had utmost need of both his 
work and his gifts. Men nowadays may fall 
into that same fallacy: that while they must 
join the battle for the world of righteousness 
and justice and order and peace, it is not their 
efforts that will bring the new world in, it is 
of the goodness and predetermination of God; 
and the battle is a play on which God looks to 
see how well his people take their part. This 
fallacy has had some recent and practical illus- 
trations. It is the source of the cry for God to 
interfere at every human crisis. It was because 
men and women felt this way, though they 
probably were not aware of all that was in- 
volved in their feelings, that they asked, "Why 
does God not stop the war?" "Why does God 
permit the Armenian massacres?" It is because 
of this same feeling that a good many men and 
women are inquiring why God lets Europe and 
Soviet Russia and the rest of the world keep 
reeling on in disorder and catastrophe. 

The answer is that God is indeed with us, 
but not merely to triumph, but to fight. God, 
indeed, is with us in the battle, but he battles 



144 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

only as we wage the war. God, indeed, is with 
us, but he is not striding on alone and free, as 
Isaiah saw him, with none of the peoples with 
him, treading them in his anger and trampling 
them in his wrath and with their life blood 
sprinkled upon his garments. God makes his 
way forward only through our advance; and 
while we cannot march without him, it is only 
through us that he proceeds. He teacheth our 
hands to war and our ringers to fight because 
he has to war through our hands and fight with 
our fingers. The struggle is very real. It is 
not simply an exercise for the benefit of the 
saints; it is the indispensable labor without 
which there will be nothing to make saints of. 
In a profound and terrible fashion we are 
laborers together with God; and it is only 
through our work, through our conflict for 
righteousness, through our endurance and sacri- 
fice and pain, through our battle against con- 
ventions, through our stubborn fight for justice 
and order and goodness and knowledge and 
peace, that God comes to the victory that is his. 
We recognize this as the law of personal 
moral triumph. We are quite sure that it is 
God who worketh in us both to will and to 
work for his good pleasure, when, out of the 
strife of passion and pride and desire and fear 
and habit, we come to some place of vision, 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 145 

some new power of life, some new personal 
peace. Thomas More, in those tragic days out 
of which this version of the text has come, was 
summoned from his prison to take the oath of 
allegiance to Anne Boleyn, and so save his 
life by denying his conscience. For a moment, 
it is said, he seemed to hesitate, then he turned 
with quiet face to his son-in-law, saying, "I 
thank my God the field is won," and went back 
to the Tower and his death. He thanked God 
for the victory, but just as truly, he himself 
won it. In that experience we are all agreed; 
and it is that experience carried over into the 
range of social wrong and social struggle and 
social victory that this democracy of God, God 
with us, establishes. It is not a change in 
God's character, it is a clearer recognition of 
where his character operates. The Lord is 
King, but it is with and through us, not merely 
over us, that he maintains and expands his rule. 
So that we make, with him, our own provi- 
dences. Perhaps we can illumine that with a bit 
of coincidence. In 1389 the power of the great 
Serbian empire went down before the Turks 
in the Battle of Kossovo, one of the mediaeval 
battles where the Christians were defeated by 
the spreading forces of Mohammedanism. For 
centuries the battlefield has been covered, in 
many parts, with white stones, around which 



146 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

the legend grew that they were the bread lost 
by the Christian army in the battle, which 
by a miracle was turned into stones, on which 
the hungry Turks had broken their teeth. 
With the legend grew up the promise and ex- 
pectation that some day the Christian Serbs 
would come back in triumph on that battle- 
field, and driving out the Turks, would eat 
once more that bread of Kossovo, restored by 
another miracle of God. In October, 1912, 
in the Balkan War, the poorly equipped, half- 
famished, but victorious Serbian army drove 
the Turks before it, until they came to this old 
historic battle ground. It is reported that when 
they saw where they were the Serbian soldiers, 
not waiting for any command, saluted it as 
holy ground. Moving forward, they drove the 
Turks back, mile after mile, and there, on the 
very battlefield where, iive centuries before, 
their empire had gone down, these Serbian 
soldiers came upon eight wagon loads of ration 
biscuit abandoned by the Turks in their retreat. 
"The bread of Kossovo!" they shouted. "The 
bread of Kossovo!" God had fulfilled the 
ancient promise. But they themselves had 
driven back the Turks. 

I do not know what miracles still linger in 
the hands of the Almighty, what interventions 
of his grace await the moment of our emergency; 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 147 

but unless life lies, God, who worketh in us both 
to will and to work his good pleasure, fulfills 
our eternal tradition of the victory of the good, 
only as we, through genuine and stubborn and 
sometimes sacrificial struggle, win for our world 
the spoils of moral war. 

Ill 

But if we are not careful, thinking about 
God in this way will cost us something of that 
comfortable confidence we have had in the 
thought of God the King enthroned above the 
tempest of the earth and, by his omnipotence, 
swinging the world of men to his design. And 
it was comfortable to be able to say, no matter 
what was going on in the world, that God was 
mysteriously directing affairs; and that God 
would overrule everything, and in his good time 
punish the wicked and reward the good, and 
make things all that they ought to be. And, 
of course, it is not for me or for anyone else to 
say what God absolutely is. Doubtless in some 
far more splendid fashion and more stupendous 
than we have imagination to conceive or 
spiritual insight to infer God is throned and 
glorious amid eternal majesties, such as John 
the Revealer tried through beautiful but broken 
speech to suggest. But there is also this other 
aspect which I have been trying to illuminate, 



148 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

for while that old royal thought of God can 
be comfortable, on the other hand it can also 
be the most disturbing thought in the world, 
because our experience seems so constantly 
to be contradicting it. God may be sitting 
omnipotent above the march of men, but 
wrong and injustice and agony and evil are 
interwoven through their everyday procession 
in the world. God may be directing everything 
to his good ends, but men and women are going 
down in defeat and bitterness and suffering 
and failure. God may be ruling from his throne 
the tempestuous affairs of states and societies, 
but war stamps out the homes and happiness 
of millions, breaks uncounted unoffending 
hearts, flings a myriad men and boys into 
rough-hewn graves, and wrecks the peace and 
hope and faith of generations. God may be 
throned and all-powerful and all-knowing, but 
his most loyal servants are broken on the wheel 
of life and die fighting his battle for a righteous- 
ness that does not yet appear. Something is 
wrong ! If you rest your confidence in the good 
that is and is to be on the sheer power of God, 
then you have to answer the question, "Why 
doesn't he do the business?" You have to face 
the agnostic dilemma that either God can't, 
or else he does not know, or else he does not 
care. Either he is not all-powerful, or he is 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 149 

not all-knowing or he is not all good. But 
the dilemma disappears if you see God as with 
us, the Great Democrat, for the source of pro- 
gress in a democracy is not power but good will; 
not the accumulation of external force, but the 
organization of effective character. Amid the 
evils yet unconquered — poverty, ignorance, in- 
justice, war — we are yet sure of the victory of 
the good, not because of God's throne, but be- 
cause of God's self; not because of what he 
can arbitrarily do, but because of what he ab- 
solutely is. We have our fighting and our 
failure, and men go down beneath the feet of 
militant and bitter wrong; but the root of the 
wrong is in human will to wrong, the defeat 
of that wrong will be by the human will to 
right; and the good shall triumph, and we shall 
be vindicated, and as my mother used to say, 
"It will all turn out right in the end," because 
what is involved in the struggle is not God's 
knowledge but God's character. Our will to 
right is an instrument of his power; our war 
for the right is the practical application of 
his purpose. He is not above the battle; he is 
in it; and the good ultimately wins, or God's 
character is gone. 

So we come back to where we started : though 
he is the Great Democrat, inextricably involved 
with us in the struggle, the Lord is still King, 



150 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

be the peoples never so impatient; though the 
ancient spectacle of his throne is removed, he 
is still enthroned among the realities of life, 
though the earth be never so unquiet. 

In this vision of the world, not as the sport 
of omnipotence, but as the militant adventure 
of righteousness; in this conception of God, 
not as the Infinite, unrelated to the finite save 
by the inconsistent interjections of caprice, but 
as the great Comrade, touching elbows with 
us in the march, and coming to his victory as 
we fight, we shall find life itself victory, what- 
ever may be our personal fortune. 

After four hundred years we are still stirred 
by the words that Shakespeare puts upon the 
lips of his Henry V, on the way to the Battle of 
Agincourt. It was fought on the day of the old 
church feast of Saint Crispin; and Shakespeare 
has Henry summoning his soldiers like this: 

"This day is called the feast of Crisp ian. 
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, 
Will stand a tiptoe when this day is nam'd, 
And rouse him at the name of Crispian. 

"For he to-day that sheds his blood with me 
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, 
This day shall gentle his condition: 
And gentlemen in England now abed 
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, 
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks 
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day." 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 151 

We are still more stirred when we think upon 
a later battle; and I know no tightening of 
the throat, no tugging of the heart, to equal 
that which thrilled me when I faced a certain 
scarred and hardened British trooper, with a 
special decoration on his breast, and knew that 
he had been of that immortal company the 
German emperor called "The Little Con- 
temptibles" which went out at the beginning 
of the war, not to fight simply, but to throw 
away their lives. I think my feeling could not 
have been more than a shadow to his own, when 
he answered my question, "I fought at Mons, 
sir," and I recalled the slaughter of that fur- 
nace where the first shock of the war came home 
to England; and I remembered that terrible 
retreat, whose helpless, harried struggle delayed 
the German rush, and I recalled how, upon the 
broken bodies of the British dead there, and 
the broken spirits of the defeated, the Allied 
Cause marched on to the decisive victory of 
the Marne. England's army, with a thousand 
years of great traditions, knows no pride of 
service greater than simply to have fought at 
Mons. It is that greatness, not of triumph but 
of battle, that greatness, sublimated, sanctified, 
transformed to the sublime, which gathers 
around our moral struggle, not that we fight, 
but that we fight with God. And because we 



152 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

fight together with God, because fighting side 
by side with God, the victory is sure, because 
somewhere shall appear — is appearing contin- 
ually — the new earth wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness, though our eyes may not behold it 
until we look out from the new heaven — be- 
cause of all this, if we fall, not having won the 
triumph but not having quit the fight, there is 
a splendor that shall at last come home to us 
in some immeasurable experience, as out of the 
dust in which 

"we lay life's glory dead, 

From the ground there blossoms red 

Life that shall endless be." 

It is the splendor of those who, having obtained 
a good report through faith, received not the 
promise, but are to be made perfect when the 
new world, for which, far down the files of 
time, they give their lives, comes thundering 
at the gates of eternity the perfect victory 
of God. 

I found this version of the text, you will re- 
member, in a personal experience overseas. 
Let me close the sermon with another experi- 
ence. I was going out, one afternoon, from a 
war-wracked little city hard upon the German 
lines, to one of our front-line camps, and the 
trenches where our soldiers were then holding 
a sector in the eastern part of France. At 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 153 

night we had continually heard the distant 
mutter of the guns; and German bombers came 
over by moonlight often enough to let us know 
they knew the way. The heart of the little 
city was a desolation; and four years of war 
had carved a bitter story in the hearts of the 
population that remained. We were going out, 
that afternoon, following a night and morning 
of heavy rain, to where our trenches and the 
Germans' were only a few hundred yards apart. 
As we drove down the beaten road, we could 
gauge our approach to the active front by the 
repairs visible upon it, by the newly filled holes 
beside it, and by the holes which had arrived 
too recently to have yet been repaired. We 
passed beside the canvas walls that concealed 
the traffic from German flyers, and under the 
flapping cloths and reeds that were stretched 
above us, through war-torn villages where com- 
panies of our troops awaited their turn in the 
trenches. At one point we turned a sloping 
curve on a hill, and a tree standing out beside 
the road and fixed in my memory like Homer's 
wind-beat fig tree outside the walls of Troy, 
had a board on it with this observation: "Be 
cautious — the enemy sees you now." Well, 
if he did, he saw one earnest American wishing 
that a Ford could go faster. But I saw some- 
thing else. It was all right for noncombatants 



154 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

to be cautious; but all along the way at the 
roadside, and out upon the slopes, and there in 
the valley were graves, single graves, and here 
a group, each with a wooden cross at the head 
and on each cross the tri-color of France to 
tell that there had fallen a French soldier, 
righting, dying, to drive back the ancient en- 
emies of the republic. It was a sight to sober 
you. When I reached my journey's end I 
climbed an observation post in a great tree 
and looked out over the country. There were 
the rolling hills, and the lovely valley lands, 
and in the mellow sunlight the mists from the 
steaming earth were rising in the gentle wind, 
and drifting like the shadows of a dream around 
slope and summit, lifting there upon the hill- 
crests, to show, far off, the purple depths of 
autumn haze that haunt the hills with mystery. 
I saw a dozen little villages huddled in the 
hollows as if half-frightened by the tragedy 
around them; heard here and there the rattle 
of a rifle, yonder the heavier detonation of 
the great guns; and then a captain who was 
with me said, "You are looking into Alsace, 
and if it were perfectly clear, you could see 
Strasbourg." There in front of me were the 
lost provinces! And I thought of the lost lives 
marked by the graves I had passed, and the 
German colors still floating yonder over the 



GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 155 

Alsatian city; the whole deep human tragedy 
of men who died to win their own and did 
not win it! There is the epic of life! The 
struggle of so many of us which seems to end 
in emptiness and defeat ! But two months later 
the war was over; in Metz the statue of the 
Kaiser was tumbled down, chains locked around 
its granite wrists and over it the legend printed, 
"So passes the glory of this world," and there 
in Strasbourg, where the German colors had 
flaunted their contempt for forty years, the 
flag of France went up to tell the world the 
lost provinces had been regained. And I re- 
membered, when I read that stirring chapter 
in the great struggle, I remembered those 
graves which, when I saw them, had seemed 
so fruitless, and I knew once more, as you know, 
that no glory of the living can compare to the 
tragic, pathetic, but divine, incalculable mag- 
nificence of those upon whose death the victory 
comes marching down the years. 

In the struggle of the world for good it is 
ours to fight, perhaps it is not ours to see the 
good advance. It is ours to fail, to fall perhaps, 
but if God is not a myth, if truth is not a fantasy 
which fevered generations have dreamed amid 
the dust, in the spacious consummation when 
the spirits of the just are made forever perfect, 
it will be ours to know that the lost provinces 



156 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

of human life, the alienated cities of experience 
have been returned upon the graves of our en- 
deavor, fruitless as at the time they may have 
seemed; it will be ours then to know that we 
have had indispensable part in making the 
kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our 
Lord and of his Christ. 



VI 
LIFE AND THE ENDURING LOVE 



For I am persuaded that neither death, nor 
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things 
present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall 
be able to separate us from the love of God, 
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans 8. 38. 



LIFE AND THE ENDURING LOVE 

This is a very deceptive sentence. It con- 
tains a catalogue of apparently threatening 
things. One thinks, when he gets to the end 
of it, that surely the love of God is omnipotent 
if it can withstand the attack of these terrible 
antagonisms. But if you will think about these 
antagonisms, one by one, they will lose much 
of their terribleness. They are like the ancient 
Chinese who rushed at their enemies making 
the most threatening grimaces and uttering the 
most terrible cries, but who ran away if the 
enemies stood their ground. This sentence 
makes faces at you and shouts out loud, but, 
after all, most of it is very tame. Like Nick 
Bottom, the weaver, it roars gently. It is a 
fierce gesture with no fist in it. The love of 
God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, may 
well be omnipotent, but not simply because 
most of these things named in the text are 
powerless over it. 

Take death, for instance. Death shall not 
be able to separate us from the love of God. 
Of course not! If there is any God at all, 
death is only a door into some other room in 
this house of his which we call the universe. 
159 



160 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Paul said that for him to live was Christ, and 
to die would be gain. Cardinal Fisher, going 
to his execution in the bitter days of Henry 
VIII, amazed his servant by dressing in his 
best clothes. "Dost thou not mark, man," 
he said, "that this is our wedding day?" Alfred 
Cookman, a generation ago one of American 
Methodism's great preachers and seers, left 
his imperishable witness, shouting faintly as he 
died, "I am sweeping through the gates of the 
New Jerusalem, washed in the blood of the 
Lamb." We are common folks, but we have 
uncommon memories, some of us, of our dear 
dead; and we know that death did not separate 
them from the love of God. 

And angels? What about them? That 
luminous company 

"... unnumbered, 

By Jacob . . . seen as he slumbered 

Alone in the desert at night"; 

or Gabriel, the herald who shall call the dead 
on resurrection morning; or Michael, the cap- 
tain of the hosts of glory; or Sandalphon, the 
angel of prayer — all that mystic multitude with 
which faith and legend have peopled the unseen 
spaces of the worlds that are and are to be; 
why, they can't separate us from the love of 
God. They are all his ministers, servants of 
his to do his pleasure. When the fevered im- 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 161 

agination of the French soldiers, so terribly 
battered there in the first savage onslaught of 
the Germans, saw strange and ghostly figures 
walking between them and the German lines, 
the thought that flashed new strength and 
courage to their hearts was that God was with 
them. Angels, whatever they can or cannot 
do, cannot separate us from God. We did not 
need Paul to tell us that. 

Principalities! just another name in the 
outstretch of the human understanding to ap- 
prehend the unimaginable dignities of the 
celestial world; and powers! the same lunge of 
the mind of men to grasp the austere pomps 
of life that pass beyond our ken. Tennyson's 

"Great Intelligences fair 
That range above our mortal state" — 

all of them, whatever else they may be, are 
creatures brought forth by the will of the 
Almighty, and bent but to serve his purposes. 
Of course, they cannot separate us from his 
love! 

But what of "things present"? After all, 
that is the bigger question. Things present! 
The things that are swamping us now — cares 
and sorrows and perplexities and all the welter 
of it — aren't they separating us from the love 
of God? They cannot do it in a thousand years. 



162 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Because he is one of them ! He is a very present 
help in trouble. And "things to come"! What 
of them? The long, bleak, black fears that 
fling their shadows over us from sinister to- 
morrows! The inevitables that terrify us as 
we look forward; the inexorable experiences 
against which we have fought, but which now 
we see beating down upon us while all our 
prayers and tears and toils and sacrifices go 
for nothing! What of them? Why, he is one 
of them, too! "Lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world." That is what 
Christ has to say about them; and long before 
him, a saint and psalmist caught God's en- 
during tenderness, and cried a deathless truth: 
"Thou wilt guide me with thy counsel, and 
afterward" — things to come — "and afterward 
receive me to glory." Nothing to be afraid of 
there ! 

Nor height! "If I ascend up into heaven, 
thou art there." Nor depth! "If I make my 
bed in hell, behold, thou art there.' Nor any 
other creature, any other created thing, dis- 
tance, for instance, separation itself ! Robinson 
Crusoe on his island, with only Matthew Ar- 
nold's "salt, unplumbed, estranging sea" around 
him, and the pitiless silence of an uninhabited 
lost land for his home; Captain Dreyfus, in the 
unfathomable bitterness of his exile on Devil's 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 163 

Island, disgraced and undone, and apparently 
beyond the pity or the care of the world; 
Captain Scott, dying amid the awful wastes 
of polar ice — surely such loneliness, such tragic 
wastes and exiles, separate from God! Well, 
not if thirty centuries of experience have any 
word to say "If I take the wings of the morn- 
ing, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the 
sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and 
thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely 
the darkness shall cover me; even the night 
shall be light about me." 

What a false alarm this verse is, after all! 
But then there is one word we have passed by. 
Life! And when you say that, you bring back 
all the terrors we had exploded. For life is the 
great separator. Why, life, in some aspects, 
is only another name for separation itself. 
Here is our first glimpse of it, a single cell 
dividing itself, and the two resultant cells 
dividing themselves into four, the process of 
fissure, as the biologists call it, until from that 
simple act of separation the stately march of 
life moves upward and onward into its most 
complex and noble forms. Here is another 
aspect of it, as Bergson has outlined it for 
us with that reasoning which has altered all 
our modern thinking; and he shows us life 
as energy, a strange increasing movement, 



164 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

urging on in its mysterious impulse through 
matter, turning this way and eventuating in 
instinct, turning that way and achieving in- 
tellect; a separation which is life itself. And 
coming out of the range of technical science 
and psychology and the like, here is the common 
human experience, that life, as we live it, is a 
stream which ever and forever separates us from 
what once we were and did and experienced 
and loved. Life, I repeat, is the great separator, 
and you can picture it as Hardy's Tess of the 
D'Aubervilles saw it, where the years to come 
seemed a great company of dark specters, 
hurrying toward her with forbidding hands, 
and saying, "Beware o' me! Beware o' me!" 
And most of us, at some time, have known such 
an experience. All of us have known the deep, 
generally unspoken, tragedy of life's separations. 
There are two memories which I think will 
always remain with me from our family vaca- 
tions yonder on the lake. One is of a pleasant 
Sunday afternoon when in front of our cottage 
an old man was saying good-by to an old 
woman. He had come from Chicago to call 
on her at our summer home, that morning, as 
a surprise. They had been young folks together 
in the good old "back east," had worked and 
played and fellowshipped together in the happy 
fashion of young men and women years and 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 165 

years ago, had looked out on life together from 
the windows of a common youth, and forty 
years ago he had gone west and they had not 
met since. They had had a few hours together 
this day, and now he was leaving and they 
stood under a poplar tree saying farewell. 
Beyond, was the noble tumult of the lake 
rolling in, half-like the ocean, under a cloudy 
sky, with here and there the sunshine breaking 
through to dapple its unresting waters, the 
whole vast expanse of it shadowed and sun- 
shined in the ageless symbol of eternity; and 
the old man, with a suspicion of moisture in 
his eyes, was saying, "Good-by; God knows 
whether I'll ever see you again." How many 
billows had beaten on that lake shore since 
they had met before, how much of toil and 
loneliness and sorrow had come to both of 
them since those golden days of which all this 
day they had been talking, after forty years! 
And now, as they said good-by for probably 
the last time, you could feel the profound 
tragedy of life that had carried them so far 
from the old, foregone, but unforgotten days 
of long ago. 

And again, one night, we had come from the 
boat in the city a couple of miles away, on 
which one of the boys had returned home, and 
we turned down a walk by the lake, around a 



166 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

jutting corner of high grass and trees and a 
cottage, and there in the dim light, sitting 
together on a log that had been rolled up by 
the restless water, were a boy and a girl, 
silhouetted in the shadowy light, looking out 
over the darkling surface of lake, to watch 
the boat on which their brother was going away. 
Over them was the amazing night, the sky 
blazing with stars; in front of them the tireless 
water murmuring along the shore; yonder the 
lighthouses winking their alternate lights, and 
here they sat, two small shapes, looking, and 
looking, and looking, with all the infinite pathos 
of childhood on them, looking to see their 
brother go away. What divergent paths their 
feet must travel in the long dark years ahead! 
What far, wide partings they will know, when 
the boy has gone up and out into the mighty 
business of a man's life, and the little girl has 
gathered to her grown womanhood the toils 
and sorrows that make the experience of ma- 
turity ! If you knew Burns, you could not help 
thinking of those lines, 

"We twa hae run about the braes, 
And pu'd the gowans fine, 
But we've wander'd mony a weary foot 
Sin' auld lang syne." 

The lake will keep murmuring down the years, 
and other boats will go out upon it, and other 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 167 

little folks will watch its waters darkling under- 
neath the summer stars, but these two — they 
will go farther and farther from their brother, 
and from each other, and from childhood and 
youth, and all that each succeeding year will 
mean; and the long procession of life, for them 
as for everybody else, will be recurrent separ- 
ation. Beware of Life! This is, after all, 
a terrible verse, for life is so terrible in its 
separating power. I wonder if Saint Paul is 
right when he says that life shall not be able 
to separate us from the love of God. 

I 

First of all, there is the separating power of 
life's enthusiasms: and you cannot have our 
personal human life at all without enthusiasms 
as perhaps the chief factor in it. Childhood 
is a succession of enthusiasms, impetuous pur- 
suits of immediate purposes. Youth is a pro- 
cession of them; and there is no more common, 
no more human, no more happy segment of 
social experience than that which we watch 
in the changing enthusiasms of young men and 
women. An end in view seizes your growing 
boy — a camp, a trip, a horse, a gun, a fly-rod 
or a wireless apparatus — and it forms the sum 
and substance of his personal interest. Days 
pass, but the one vision fills his entire horizon, 



168 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

until distracted parents wonder if they will go 
stark mad with the endless echo of a single 
idea reverberating in their minds. And then 
a day comes when, almost suddenly, the camp, 
the trip, the horse, the gun, the fly-rod, or the 
wireless is heard no more. It is a college which 
covers the sky of his ambition. He feeds upon 
its fame. Its jargon becomes the classic lan- 
guage of his entire conversation. Its athletic 
victories are the important transactions of the 
century. Life is measured by the standards 
of its local wise men, usually of the sophomore 
year, besides which the knowledge that parents 
and friends have won in the hard battles of 
experience outside the academic gates is as 
nothing. Its heroes dwarf the mighty men of 
history; and a long-suffering social circle lives 
in anxious hope of a day when it will no longer 
have this flood of special and noisy omniscience 
poured out upon its patience. Yet another 
day comes, and with it another passion packs 
the last cranny of the young man's interest. 
A business venture, a professional career, a 
love, a new home — and so life unfolds from 
year to year its meaning and magnificence in a 
series of enthusiasms. You are picturing now, 
with no help from the preacher, this same idea 
expressing itself under other and different 
aspects. But the one aspect with which at 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 169 

this point I am particularly concerned is this: 
that each of these enthusiasms sharply separ- 
ates, not itself, but the enthusiastic life from 
all else. Life, to put it in other words, thus 
separates itself from its social surroundings; 
for such an enthusiasm is a flame within which 
only those can enter who are kindled by the 
same fires. It separates from all preceding 
enthusiasms, so that as one looks back upon 
them, each shows small or immature or tawdry 
in the glare and blaze of what is the present 
consuming passion. It separates, more or less 
completely, from other knowledge, either born 
of experience, or won from books which are 
the crystallized experiences of the race. Under 
the full pressure of an enthusiasm, the other 
activities of the mind and heart recede or are 
in suspense. Faith, except in the object of an 
enthusiasm, is only a word. Affection goes 
dormant; for a consuming interest, though it 
be only in a boat, makes even love, for the 
time being, a habit rather than a self-expres- 
sion. One stands amid the host of enterprises 
and relationships which constitute his world, 
insulated as within a ring of fire by the special 
passion which possesses him. 

Now, the frank history of men records the 
unblinking fact that their enthusiasms have 
separated them, again and again, from the 



170 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

knowledge, from the experience of, from inter- 
est in, from recognition of the love of God. 
In that enduring thirteenth-century romance 
of Aucassin and Nicolette, Aucassin, at one 
time, breaks out in a clamor against paradise. 
He says he does not want to go there. Was 
it not Huckleberry Finn who said that he could 
see no advantage in going to heaven if his aunt 
were going too? Aucassin has a kindred 
point of view; the company assembled in the 
mediaeval paradise doesn't suit him. But says 
he: 

"To hell I am willing to go. For, to hell go the fine 
scholars and the fair knights who die in tournies and in 
glorious wars; and the good men-at-arms and the well- 
born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the 
fair courteous ladies ... And the gold and silver go there, 
and the ermines and the sables; and there go the harpers 
and jongleurs, and the kings of the world. With these will 
I go. . . ." 

In his mediseval enthusiasm for chivalry, its 
lusters and pomps and the glamour of its 
courtesies and power, he is willing to be away 
from God. But it is not in that simple, child- 
like fashion that modern enthusiasm separates 
from the consciousness and care for the love 
of God. It is a slower but perhaps more fatal 
process of incrustation; as changing enthusi- 
asms melt into one commanding passion which 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 171 

becomes life itself. Here it is Charles Darwin, 
giving himself to his researches in the origins 
of species and the variations in type, spending 
a busy, wonderful half-century in the micro- 
scopic study of plant and animal forms, until, 
as he confesses, he had lost all taste for poetry 
and other literature, all sympathy and care for 
music, all interests in any direction except the 
one all-engrossing investigation which so long 
had been his one pursuit and passion. Here it 
is Whistler, seeing only beauty in a hundred 
shifting visions of light and line and form and 
color; hearing only beauty in the voice of winds 
and stormy waters and the murmur of the sea, 
in human laughter and the noise of toil and 
tragedy that make up the throbbing of the 
world; seeing beauty and hearing beauty, and 
in a fever of creation trying always to express 
the vision and give body to the sound, and 
always falling far below the ideal caught by 
the inner spirit, and apparently shut away, by 
his enthusiasm for that objective loveliness, 
from thought of, or feeling for, or fellowship 
with the Great Source whose will must have 
projected beauty as some dim expression of the 
divine character. Here it is another scientist 
sweeping the heavens with mighty glasses, and 
though one such, standing awed before the 
infinite splendor of solar space and solar worlds, 



172 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

said, "I am thinking God's thoughts after 
him," another, looking coldly out upon the 
stars as so much and so many combinations of 
dead matter, remarked of God, "I have no 
need for that hypothesis," his very enthusiasm 
for the facts before him rising as a barrier 
between himself and any interest in or care for 
the love of Him who might be behind those facts. 
You may take this line of investigation still 
further and apparently to more fatal conclu- 
sions. The saddest, blackest pages in the his- 
tory of humanity are those on which is written 
the story of an enthusiasm for God himself 
isolating the soul from vital appreciation of 
him. We have it again and again in the world's 
history; when men whose lives were profes- 
sionally devoted to the service of God, priests, 
prophets, monks, popes, Puritans, in a fanatic 
passion for God and his revelation and his law, 
have been carried far out into tempers, habits 
of thought, hardness of spirit, in which the 
love of the God of their loyalty was utterly 
beyond their recognition. So has begun and 
been maintained every religious persecution. 
So was the Inquisition carried on. So were 
the witches burnt in Salem and the Baptists 
exiled from Massachusetts, until the vast gal- 
lery of religious biography is crowded from 
beginning to end, with here and there the 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 173 

grim, impassioned, often ascetic, unrelenting 
pesecutors, whose enthusiasm for God lost 
them all those holy and wholesome experiences, 
those fine tendernesses, that grave and winsome 
brotherliness, which together mark those who 
know the love of God which is in Christ Jesus 
our Lord. 

And we are not without our aspect of this 
same fatality in our own day, for our genera- 
tion has seen its scholars, devoted to God and 
the gospel in its purity, giving themselves to 
patient study of the Revelation here, dedicating 
their lives to the scrutiny of the records, sacri- 
ficing time and position and honor and the 
comforts of social life, in their passion for re- 
ligious scholarship, and in their zeal for correct 
dates, for pure texts, for rigid and accurate 
reconstruction of the passages and documents 
which make up the literary vehicle of truth, 
freezing all experiences of power, stifling all 
the joy of the Lord, withering the capacities 
for spiritual vision and communication, until 
amid a busy and clamorous day that cries for 
the very truth of God and the gospel and 
Christ immanent in experience, they have stood 
too often like dusty ghosts, speaking a language 
only scholarship itself cares to hear, repeating 
words with no compelling message and no 
lifting meaning to the soul. 



174 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

In all of these instances which I have drawn 
from the book of human experience around us, 
to illustrate the thought, this one thing has 
taken place: life has become an enthusiasm, 
the enthusiasm and life coincide, and between 
the soul and God, rather between the soul's 
consciousness of God and the love of God, a 
great gulf has been fixed. Life, after all, is 
the terrible thing; not these others mentioned 
in the text. Life does seem to separate from 
God. And yet Paul includes it in his list of 
incompetents. "I am persuaded that . . . life 
shall not be able to separate us." Can he be 
right? 

II 

For there are also the absorbing loves which 
coincide with life; and love is a separating 
stream. I included it a moment ago, in a 
passing remark, among the enthusiasms, but it 
is more than an enthusiasm, it is itself a life 
that sharply divides from much else beside. 
Some two or three years ago we had one of 
those peculiarly spectacular revelations of the 
greatness of human love which from time to 
time stir an entire people. When that obscure 
Chicago man, William Tanner, unable to free 
his wife from the rails where she was caught, 
said, "I won't leave you," and with her in 
his arms went to a death more terrible because 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 175 

it could be seen approaching, he thrilled the 
world which read, next day, the story. But 
that exhibition of the power of a great human 
love, while intensely dramatic, is, after all, a 
story told in a thousand ways, and shown in 
a thousand fashions many times more difficult 
and taxing. Only the books of God are big 
enough to keep the record of the women who 
have followed love; and not only followed it, 
but lived upon it and cherished it and warmed 
their broken hearts at its undying fires, while 
the objects of it have been base and unworthy 
and unmindful of them: mothers who have 
built the only shrines in which their troubled 
spirits could find any peace on earth, in their 
unspoiled affection for sons gone wrong, un- 
filial, untrue, unclean, ungrateful; for daughters 
who returned ribaldry for every mother-prayer, 
and insolence for every tender caution, and im- 
purity for every tear-drenched appeal for 
womanhood! Wives who have endured and 
still endure unmitigated hardships, the loss of 
old associations, old friends, old comfort, old 
pride of family, the loss of health and hope, 
who have borne and bear hunger, rags, utter 
cruelties of speech and sneer and loneliness and 
blows, strengthening themselves in some mys- 
tery of unfathomable womanhood by old fair 
memories of better times and buried tenderness 



176 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

on which their love still feeds amid the wilder- 
ness and wastes of their domestic tragedy ! Who 
can recount the innumerable heroisms of men, 
staggering without complaint under inestimable 
burdens, the irreparable disappointment of 
their children's wasted lives, the unending 
sacrifice compelled by family misfortune, by 
illnesses, madnesses, sins? Why, this repeated 
miracle of human affection, capturing life and 
nerving it to undreamed sufferings, sustaining 
it under unimaginable loads, inspiring and im- 
pelling it to incalculable toils, is beyond our 
appreciation. Only one explanation has ever 
seemed adequate, and that was written under 
the impress of divine insight, "Love is of God." 
But there is another form of this same reve- 
lation. Our human loves have often been the 
highways on which souls have walked toward 
heaven; but they are often the flaming roads 
down which men and women rush to unspeak- 
able disaster. That is the story too often 
written on the scarlet woman's painted face. 
That is the tale too often to be heard 
if one could reach the deepest places in the 
heart of many a broken, outcast man. The 
passion of love, first pure and never without 
its tragic gesture of repentance, has peopled 
innumerable felons' cells, has recruited the 
regiments of vice, has built uncounted scaffolds, 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 177 

has digged its million desolate graves. Some 
one has said that the love that lifts life, that 
sweetens, and fortifies, and hallows it, is a con- 
suming fire, which is true enough. But there 
is a love that sinks life, that fouls and crumbles 
it, and stains it beyond all measure, and that 
too is a consuming fire. When Ruth said to 
Naomi, "Whither thou goest, I will go; and 
where thou lodgest, I will lodge, . . . where thou 
diest, will I die, and there will I be buried," 
she gave pure love a liturgy, music to march 
by and a banner to wave; but those words, 
at the same time, are the dirge to which love 
goes to its desecration, and with which many 
a once pure and impassioned spirit walks the 
way whose steps take hold on hell. 

Now, the important aspect of these several 
manifestations of love is the same as that to 
which I called your attention in respect of en- 
thusiasm; in each case and kind love is an ex- 
clusive passion. It isolates the soul. It divides 
sharply from other interests. Family, tradi- 
tions, pride, prosperity, comfort, reputation, 
career, eternal destiny itself — every one of these 
prime factors in our human life and valuation 
is repeatedly abandoned in the flame and 
passion of this consuming fire. 

When you lift this personal human affection 
into its wider but no less real range, of love for 



178 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

humankind as well as for special individuals, 
the peril of it is at once more subtle and hardly 
less sure. We have rightly come to count love 
for our kind, made effective in those social 
ministries which aim at a just and peaceful 
world, as perhaps the highest manifestation of 
the religious spirit. To-day, as never before, 
though for a generation these tides of social 
enthusiasm have been rising, the social spirit 
is made coincidental with religion itself. "We 
know that we have passed from death unto 
life, because we love the brethren." The love 
of God, a vast, high, holy thing, sounds through 
the Bible in repeated language and appeal, as 
a noble theme is interwoven through the vari- 
ations of a symphony. It used to be conceived 
as some deep, felt, solemn experience, as if the 
individual spirit were upborne upon some 
strange ocean tide of the Divine. But now men 
are estimating it, not by how a soul feels, or 
is personally sustained, or awed, or strength- 
ened, but by how much such a one accomplishes 
in the most practical affairs of his community. 
While England was stirred and purified and 
saved from the political and social disasters of 
the French Revolution, where it was smitten 
by a sense of social responsibility, where its 
humblest and most disadvantaged classes were 
cleansed and illumined and reborn to new 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 179 

loyalties and new life by the evangelical revival 
of the Wesleys, America is to be saved from the 
extravagances of the Russian tragedy by an 
economic readjustment, whatever that may be 
interpreted to mean. Where Hus and Luther 
and Wyclif and the Wesleys led men to 
prayer and repentance and the experience of 
the love of God, modern apostles of reform will 
install domestic science classes, shower baths 
and moving pictures; to good results of their 
kind, and with the noblest of intents, but to 
limited consequences. In a hundred accents 
the social movement of to-day is tossing up, 
in almost pathetic triumph, the words "Brother- 
hood!" and "Love of men!" and the like. But 
the tragedy of it all, terrible in its possible 
social outcome, is that, as the younger Dumas 
said long ago, "Our world is about to realize 
the words 'Love one another,' without being 
concerned whether a man or a God uttered 
them." Nothing, I dare say, is more apparent 
in the whole yeasty turmoil of the present social 
and industrial confusion, in which, as never 
before, much is being made of brotherhood and 
love of men, than the hard, harsh fact that the 
love of God is not in all their thoughts. Yet 
this love of men personal or social, is as real 
as life, for it is life. Oh, life is the great word 
in this catalogue of things which Paul says cannot 



180 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

separate us from the love of God, which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord; but is Paul right? For 
here are men and women by the thousand, 
caught in the sweep of great personal and 
greater social passion, and without conscious- 
ness of that love of God, without contact with 
that Christ. 

Ill 

Then, again, there is still something else, 
another aspect into which life settles for many, 
many people. One by one enthusiasms pass, 
and at last the great enthusiasm with which 
life for a long time coincided withers and is 
dead. Fai ure may have killed it, misfortune 
may have shriveled it; the strangling clutch 
of demands and obligations which could not be 
escaped may have choked it into dust. Love, 
which once was life itself, may lose its passion. 
Death may have transferred its outreach; long 
possession may gradually have cooled it, until 
all the glamour, the romance, the mystery, the 
marvel of it has been long vanished, long for- 
gotten, in the deadening comradeship of mean 
struggles or dull duties. And with enthusiasm 
dead and love dwindled into a habit or associ- 
ation, life takes on another and more exclusive 
character. In one of the stories of Anatole 
France he retells the old tale of an Eastern 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 181 

king who commissioned a wise man to write 
for him the history of mankind. When the 
history was completed and presented to him 
in its massive volumes, and he wondered at the 
size of it, the wise old historian said, "It can 
all be told in a single sentence, 'They were 
born, they suffered, and they died.' ' That, 
of course, is not true. The history of men can- 
not be told in so bleak a sentence as that. 
But for very many of them, for not a few of you 
who read these words, life writes itself as gray 
and hopeless monotony. 

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death." 

Is not that the most common story of our lives? 
There is a dullness in our very prosperity at 
times; our comfortableness, which, theoreti- 
cally, gives us leisure to think and dream and 
aspire, too frequently becomes our opportunity 
to do nothing of the kind; like the traveling 
man of whom I read recently, who said that 
he used to read in his idle time on the road, 
but he had to have something to occupy his 
mind, so he played cards instead. 

And when life is not prosperous, when it is 



182 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

a hard struggle for the necessities of living, 
how it becomes a weary round of repeated, 
almost routine actions, rising, eating, working, 
sleeping, and the days stretch out behind, dusty 
with the tramp of commonplaces, and stretch 
out in front, gray and sordid with their un- 
relieved routine! 

Now, there is no more excluding thing than 
monotony. Adventure is always taking you 
into new relationships, always quickening the 
faculties, stirring the blood, tingling the nerves. 
If it is only the shock of terror, or the fear of 
death, or the paralysis of shame, nevertheless, 
it performs its widening of experience, its 
deepening of the roots that grip hold on reali- 
ties. But monotony is — just monotony. The 
senses seem to grow calloused by their con- 
tinuous rasp upon the commonplace. The spirit 
seems to grow hard and crusted as if the feet 
of innumerable things had gone tramping wear- 
ily over it. And men in the treadmills of un- 
illumined labor, women in the narrowed round of 
trivialities which make up so much of domestic 
duty; folks shut in on lonely farms and bound 
down to grimy mills and mean streets; and 
others in the fierce sameness of the frenzied 
struggle of any modern enterprise, look out, 
from time to time, upon the world which seems 
to flow beyond them, listen, from time to time, 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 183 

to sounds of happier variations which seem 
to blow out beyond them, and then turn wearily 
to their routine in which friendship comes to 
mean less and less, and ideals slowly fade, and 
hopes pass, and enthusiasm cannot live, and 
love itself grows monotonous and unlovely, 
until they find themselves — or would find them- 
selves, if they were not too deadened to realize 
their deadness — shut off from all the forces 
and fires and interests which go to make a full 
and happy life. And is it not so in spite of 
Paul's text here, as the psalmist wrote it long 
before the apostle, "Because they have no 
changes, therefore they fear not God"? Not 
because they defy him, but because their very 
monotonies have cut their conscious thought 
and experience clear away from him. 

One of the striking pictures in Turgenieff's 
Diary of a Superfluous Man is in a dreary 
paragraph where he describes the stevedores 
on the Volga River, in that old Russia which 
has now gone down in blood and fire, loading 
their barges stolidly, while they chant a hope- 
less song: 

"Yet another time, yet again, and nothing will be 
Either bitter or sweet to me any more." 

That is the picture of life become the grim 
monotony which too many men and women 



184 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

already know. It is neither bitter nor sweet 
to them, just another time, and then again. 
John Galsworthy somewhere writes about life 
twisting and turning hearts without mercy, 
but there is something more deeply fatal than 
that: it is life drugging hearts with dullness, 
with drab routine, until they do not feel any 
twists or turns at all. And life does that until, 
amid the recurrent drudgeries of commonplace 
and shriveling experience, many a soul has lost 
power to rebel, lost courage to hope, lost in- 
terest in its very self, and knows nothing of the 
love of God. Life is the great danger. 

And yet it is this dangerous life, with its 
capturing enthusiasms, its absorbing loves, its 
paralyzing monotonies, which Saint Paul says 
cannot separate us from the love of God which 
is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Can he be right? 

IV 

Of course he is right! One may lose all con- 
sciousness of God and God himself be close 
at hand. Every man and woman of us has 
many a time been so absorbed in some immedi- 
ate occupation, so deep in some congenial or 
uncongenial fellowship, or so wearied by the 
dull business in hand, as to be unconscious of our 
surroundings, particularly unconscious of the 
breathing which supports our life. And then, 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 185 

for no apparent cause, we have wakened to 
it all and, taking consciously a long, deep 
breath, have said, "How good this air is!" and 
have glimpsed in a moment all the freshness and 
the beauty of the world around us. It is a far, 
poor illustration, but there is a profound and 
true sense in which God is the very atmosphere 
in which we live, his righteousness the invisible, 
intangible oxygen by which wholesome ideals 
and institutions grow, and because of which 
slowly the evils of the world corrode and 
crumble into dust. 

These are noisy and threatening days; and 
men speak to one another in apprehensive tones 
of the perils to society and our institutions; 
and far and wide the currents of social passion 
and discord are cutting apparently deep chan- 
nels in the once united areas of peaceful Amer- 
ican life. Men are mightily afraid of the future, 
afraid of revolutions and riots; and the spectacle 
of criminal profits and prejudiced governments 
and undisciplined and misled industry might 
seem to offer cause to fear. But all these ener- 
gies are working, though they do not realize 
it, within the vast atmosphere of a present 
and righteous God. 

This presence is comfortably and greatly true 
for the individual life. Enthusiasm, crystal- 
lized into the consuming purpose of a life, may 



186 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

carry Darwin, Whistler, Edison, Whitman, and 
the rest of us to where the notion of God's 
love finds no echo in experience or thought; 
but the very word roots back in him — en-thu- 
siasm, in Godness, to put it into English — 
and originally conveyed the idea that souls 
united to God are characterized by zeal and 
fire; now, as Dr Jowett puts it, the word is 
limited to a description of the effect. But no 
such enthusiasm itself wholly contains the 
soul. Darwin dies as one upon the edge of a 
jungle he has not penetrated; Whistler leaves 
infinite beauty unexpressed; Edison imagines 
worlds he cannot reach ; every one of us touches 
but the shadow of what we would achieve. 
"No man," as the psalmist told his generation 
thirty centuries ago, "No man can keep alive 
his own soul." Like Wordsworth, we feel that 
we are greater than we know. 

Now, what is all this outreach, though it 
may not contain a conscious recognition of 
God, what is it nevertheless but the pressure 
of his presence, closer than breathing and nearer 
than hands and feet? All that I have been 
suggesting Francis Thompson felt and wrote 
in that marvelous poem of God pursuing the 
soul that ignorantly fled from him: 

"Nigh and nigh draws the chase, 
With unperturbed pace, 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 187 

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy; 
And past those noised Feet 
A Voice comes yet more fleet — 
*Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me.' " 

Love, your human love alone, can never 
satisfy or seem complete. I challenge you men 
and women with little folks or even larger 
folks in your homes, as you watch them sleeping 
in the innocence of childhood, or see them going 
about the happy tasks of youth, and have in 
mind the long years, and crooked roads and 
burdens and disappointments they must walk, 
and bear and meet; can you look at them 
without your love aching? Can you look out 
in the still wonder of the night, remembering 
those you love, and thinking of the endless years 
to come, and the far shadows of separation and 
bereavement which will surely fall — can you thus 
look, and remember, and not feel an immeasur- 
able incompleteness in it all? God may not so 
much as occur to your thought, but what is all 
this infinite and pathetic yearning? Is not it the 
pressure of the presence of Him of whom it is 
written, "We love because he first loved"? 

"Still with unhurrying chase 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy 
Came on the following Feet, 
And a Voice above their beat — 
'Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.' " 



188 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

And monotony — the treason of enthusiasm and 
love betraying life into the tragedy of dull 
uninterestedness — if monotony could separate 
between anyone and the love of God, there 
would be no use for God, for most of the world 
and the lives in the world are dreadfully 
monotonous. It was for just such that Christ 
came, saying, "I am come that they might have 
life, and have it more abundantly." Not long 
ago I was reading a chapter of literary criticism, 
and found the author of it writing that Kipling 
made a common people important. He did 
nothing of the kind. He recognized their im- 
portance and wrote it; but it was Christ who 
made common people important. And why is 
it that all things fall into monotony and life 
seems so meaningless and mean? Is it not 
because they keep fleeing 

"From those strong Feet that followed, followed after? 

But with imhuirying chase 

And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 

They beat, and a Voice beat 

More instant than the Feet — 
'AH things betray thee, who betrayest Me/ " 

But if you want visible evidence of God pressing 
in upon the very monotonies of otherwise mean 
existence, look around upon those whom the 
author of "Jean Christophe" calls "men and 



LIFE AND ENDURING LOVE 189 

women who, through a dull, drab life, think 
grave thoughts and live in daily sacrifice." 

But now some one is asking, at the very 
end of the sermon, Aren't the facts against the 
argument? Aren't there men and women in 
sad and terrible plenty who are separated 
from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus 
our Lord? There are, a sad and terrible plenty 
of them. But no thing separated them: they 
separated themselves. Events, enthusiasms, 
loves, monotonies, were occasions and oppor- 
tunities; they themselves were the separators. 
They went away of their own choosing; and 
with all the extenuations which can be made, 
in every occasion and experience in which they 
turned away from God and missed felt contact 
with the love of Christ, other men and women, 
equally beset and equally engulfed, kept them- 
selves, as the apostle Jude exhorts us, kept 
themselves in the love of God. 

I remember, far off now and long ago, a 
little boy who had reached the social standing 
of a surgical operation, sinking into uncon- 
sciousness as, without knowing it, he breathed 
deep of the anaesthetic. Later, when the oper- 
ation was over, as he came struggling back, 
gasping, sick, terribly frightened, battling to 
get his eyes open and in his grotesque imagina- 
tions groping wildly for support, he began to 



190 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

call, "Father! Father! Father!" And he 
opened his eyes and saw his father holding his 
hand, as he had been doing all the while, and 
saying "Father's here, sonny, father's here!" 
Has the enthusiasm of sheer living swept you 
from the old recognitions and interests in God? 
Has some fine, high affection filled the last 
corner of your consciousness till all thought 
of the divine love has been crowded out? Has 
the grievous monotony of life calloused the soul 
until your interests save in the automatic rou- 
tines of bleak living are gone, and God has 
long been out of mind? And now, by chance, 
has some faint inspiration to rediscover him, to 
toil back long distances to find him, been born 
in your heart? We are as a child struggling 
in terror. For there is for us a Voice: "The 
Father is here, Lo, I am with you — " Look up! 
Make the quick adventure of immediate as- 
surance. He is here. He has been our dwelling 
place in all generations. For not even life is 
able to separate us from his love, as it is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord. 



VII 

THE INCALCULABLE ELEMENT IN 
CHRISTIANITY 



And the jailer . . . , supposing that the pris- 
oners had escaped . . . — Acts 16. 27. 



THE INCALCULABLE ELEMENT IN 
CHRISTIANITY 

Let me emphasize very briefly the out- 
standing features in the story of the earth- 
quake at Philippi. The apostles had been 
beaten and publicly disgraced, had been not 
only imprisoned but fastened in the stocks in 
the dungeon. At midnight there had been an 
earthquake which had shaken the prison doors 
apart and doubtless had loosened the stones in 
which the stocks were fastened. The jailer, 
roused by the noise and tremor, had naturally 
rushed to secure the custody of his prisoners 
and had seen by the flickering lights that the 
doors were down. He realized in the instant that 
the prisoners would, by every probability, have 
taken advantage of so great an opportunity 
to escape. He knew also what was in store for 
him if they were gone, for by law he would 
be executed in ignominy; and with a Roman's 
keen sense of honor and equally pronounced 
indifference to suicide, he preferred death by 
his own hands to the dishonor of a public 
execution for failure of trust, however unavoid- 
able the failure might be. So, as it is written 
in the account of the occurrence, he "was 
about to kill himself." 

193 



194 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

There is a singular congeniality with history 
in this incident of the jailer's purpose of suicide 
at Philippi, for Philippi was the place of notable 
suicides. It was near here that Cassius and 
Brutus fought the fatal battle against Antony 
and Octavius, some seventy-five years before 
Paul and Silas were thrown into prison; and 
it was here that many of the defeated officers 
killed themselves because they had no hope of 
pardon from the victorious emperor. It is at 
Philippi that Shakespeare has the specter warn 
Brutus he would meet him, and here it was 
that Cassius was slain by his own command 
and Brutus took his own life, tradition has it 
with the sword with which he had stabbed 
Julius Caesar. Where the jailer was about to 
kill himself was already steeped in the tradition 
of suicide to escape dishonor. 

So that, reading the story with a feeling for 
the atmosphere of Philippi as well as for the 
spirit of the narrative itself, it gathers a deeper 
sense of tragedy. It is somewhat like one of the 
great Greek dramas: you feel in it the indefin- 
able but certain movement of fate. It would 
be hard to say which offers the more disordered 
scene, the shattered prison with the prisoners 
huddling there amid the rocking midnight, or 
the desperate spirit of the jailer drawing his 
sword. But in any case, out of the tumult of 



THE INCALCULABLE 195 

the night and the desperation of the man, 
there comes this one phrase with far deeper 
implications than the words show upon the 
surface: "The jailer . . . , supposing that the 
prisoners had escaped.' ' That was the reason 
he was about to kill himself. He thought the 
prisoners had escaped. 

It was a very natural supposition. Prisoners 
may be frightened by an earthquake and a 
storm, but few offenders would be so greatly 
frightened as to ignore the opportunity given 
by open doors at night. Nowadays, with our 
instantaneous communication across a conti- 
nent, our rapid transit,, the widely organized 
system of police and detective vigilance, with 
all the odds against the possibility of escaping, 
prisoners seldom hesitate to make the attempt 
when the chance affords. In that earlier day, 
with immensely increased probabilities of suc- 
cess, escape would be the most natural thing 
in the world, and the jailer was justified by 
all custom and knowledge oi the times to expect 
that his prisoners had gone. The inference of 
the story is that the other prisoners did not 
escape because of the conduct and character 
of these two prisoners who are the center of 
the episode, and what the jailer failed to appre- 
hend was what character of men these two 
prisoners were. There was in them a quality 



196 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

of which he had not known, which made all 
his hurried supposition wrong. He supposed 
they had escaped, but he found they were 
there. He had thought of them as criminals, 
and they were Christians. He had thought of 
them as Christians, of course, for so they were 
taunted at their hearing before the magistrates, 
but he did not know what Christians were. 
They had been condemned and beaten on a 
charge of subverting Roman law and customs; 
he was soon to discover that they claimed the 
full benefit of that law and forced the municipal 
authorities of Philippi completely to observe 
those customs. Now, in a moment of provi- 
dential opportunity they would not save them- 
selves from him, but cried out to save him from 
himself. There was an incalculable element 
in them which he had not taken into account. 
He supposed they had escaped, but discovered 
that they were there. 

It is worth thinking of these things to-day 
because ours is a day in which to a greater 
extent than some of us are aware who live in- 
tellectually within the precincts of the orthodox 
faith and the church, society, like the jailer 
at Philippi, has supposed that Christianity has 
gone. The earthquake of the past seven years 
has shaken the structure of civilization to its very 
foundations. The gates of faith, behind which 



THE INCALCULABLE 197 

it held its confidence, are broken. Of some 
of the detailed circumstances leading to that 
fatal inference I may speak presently; it is 
enough to say now, what we know quite well, 
that society is repeating, in many forms of 
expression, that in the earthquake Christianity 
has gone. 

But every tumult and disruption which 
society, for nineteen hundred years, has known, 
has ultimately gathered around Christianity, 
regardless of what other factors have been 
primarily involved; and the cry of the world's 
diverse moods in every period of disorder — 
exultation, cynicism, despair — has been this 
same cry that Christianity has gone. It has 
always supposed that the prisoner had escaped 
amid the storm. And if you will look soberly 
at the facts as time has clarified them for us, 
you will discover that, like the Philippian 
jailer in this, another aspect, society has always 
failed to take account of what history vindi- 
cates, Christianity's incalculable element. For 
if history has any lesson at all to teach about 
Christianity, it is of this incalculable element 
in it. There can be no other explanation of 
its surviving the first two hundred years after 
Christ. You do not need even those first two 
hundred years to raise the question as to how 
Christianity survived; all you need is the cross. 



198 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

How did Christianity come to life and power 
after the disciples had seen the crucifixion? 
The early persecutions only emphasize the 
marvel of it. Christianity's childhood is the 
story of a perpetual agony. The word "per- 
secution" has lost its edge to us who are so 
remote from any experience of its meaning, 
who can be only faintly stirred by the atrocities 
of the Turks upon Armenians. But it was an 
agonizing reality to those men and women to 
whom we owe all that is compassionate in life 
and civilization. They thought of their Chris- 
tian life and its adventure in terms of Roman 
crosses, of blazing fires, of wild beasts tearing 
them apart in tumultuous arenas. No man of 
the world, looking out upon the wild scene of 
suffering which was imposed on Christians dur- 
ing those two centuries and more, but would 
have said calmly enough that Christianity was 
gone; it could never survive. But at the end 
of three centuries Christianity was the official 
religion of the empire which had persecuted it. 
Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose death im- 
poverished the world of modern letters, once 
wrote of her recollections of a week in Rome, 
that the overwhelming impression she had 
there was of something infinitely old and pagan 
through which Christianity moved like a par- 
venu amid a generation of phantom presences, 



THE INCALCULABLE 199 

already gray with time long before Calvary. 
But Mrs. Ward, had she given her mind to it, 
might have seen what was most significant in 
her words, namely, that those gray old pres- 
ences are indeed phantoms, and Christianity 
is a living, moving fact. 



Now, the logical mind is impatient to remind 
me that the parallel of early Christianity with 
that of to-day is no parallel at all, for the sur- 
vival of early Christianity was a problem of 
enduring suffering forced upon it; the survival 
of Christianity to-day is a matter of remaining 
in a world whose social storms are sweeping 
away the intellectual conceptions and organized 
institutions in which it has made its home. 
The difference is quite real, but to go back to 
the imagery of the New Testament story from 
which the text is taken, there was a direct 
connection between the apostles' remaining in 
the broken prison and their having sung hymns 
of praise amid their sufferings in the stocks. 
It was not only their failure to escape which 
constrained the jailer to say, as another version 
of the Book has it, that they were servants of 
the living God; it was also their song in the 
night. The incalculable element which held 
them in the ruined prison when escape was 



200 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

easy was the same element which had sustained 
their Christian joy amid the cruelties of a 
prison from which escape was impossible. 

But, taking up the specific denials of the 
survival of Christianity which are current 
to-day, there are two with which we need now 
concern ourselves. The first is the denial which 
comes from the social and political situation 
involved in the Great War. How can we believe 
that any real Christianity remains when there 
are such evidences of its futility, in the social 
and moral catastrophes connected with the 
war? The meanest motives of cupidity, avarice, 
race jealousies, selfishness, and the pride of 
power operated in the very nations upon whose 
lips were professions of unqualified idealism. 
There was no check upon the basest passions 
of men, vicious in battle, pillage, and the 
savagery of lust. Human progress in intelligence 
measured itself in a superior capacity to inflict 
pain, a broader area for military excesses, a 
completer organization of society to maintain 
international crime. After nineteen hundred 
years war was more bestial than paganism ever 
knew. And the negotiations for peace bear 
similar witness. They and the conference which 
completed them are stamped and saturated 
with the old covetousness, secrecy, inconsis- 
tency, injustice; under fine words, the old 



THE INCALCULABLE 201 

unabashed selfishness maintained by force 
showed us the old rule of might, governed by 
expediency, sitting at the council seat which 
these same nations solemnly proclaimed would 
be dedicated to the rule of right. And not 
once in the long futile months of treaty -making, 
not once in the hundreds of pages of printed 
covenants, is there a reference to Christianity 
or the faith of men. Is this all not an acknowl- 
edgment, unacknowledged, that the failure of 
the institutions, ideals, and systems Christi- 
anity had created is a demonstration that real 
and vital Christianity itself has gone? 

History replies with the spectacle of the pre- 
Reformation church at the lowest level to which 
the organization of religion ever fell. History 
points back to the days when crime, lust, and 
unspeakable dishonor sat openly on the throne 
of the popes; when the path to power in the 
church which called itself the body of Christ 
was the way of falsehood, bribery, and assassi- 
nation; when the arch criminals of the world 
were popes, cardinals, and priests who rose from 
the sacramental table to revel in unnamable 
indecencies; turned from the altar of sacrifice 
to the torture of political opponents, and paused 
amid their repetition of the mass to plunge 
nations into war. History points back to the 
time when the private life of those who claimed 



202 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

to be the vicegerents of Christ was worse than 
paganism had exhibited. Any man, looking 
at the Church and the world then, would have 
said in despair that Christianity was gone. 
If the twentieth century has shown us a religion 
which could not prevent civilization from going 
bad, the fifteenth century shows us a religion 
which could not keep the church itself from 
going bad; and the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies were full of minds, honest and reverent 
and courageous, who were in despair because 
they supposed that Christianity had gone. 
What really happened, however, was not the 
destruction or flight of Christianity, but the 
birth of the Reformation; and out of the bitter, 
barren years of that church which failed, that 
civilization which was rotten to the heart, came 
that new vision of God, that new experience 
of truth, that new inspiration of faith and life, 
that new conduct of society, which changed 
the very face of Europe, rediscovered democ- 
racy, created the American commonwealth, 
and made religion the power of God in the 
personal life of men. In the time of midnight 
and of storm the incalculable element in Chris- 
tianity came to light. 

Then there is the supposition that Chris- 
tianity has gone amid the storm of social and 
industrial revolution which has swept and 



THE INCALCULABLE 203 

shaken the world since the war. The tumult 
and the terror in Russia are but the more 
dramatic, perhaps the more explosive, manifes- 
tation of the one vast, world-encircling tempest 
in which the earth has trembled; and the once 
trusted institutions of property and industry, 
of society itself, have been rent and broken. 
The deep, underlying forces of this social- 
industrial revolution presuppose the absence 
of any real Christianity. For the philosophy 
which maintains through the industrial up- 
heaval, criminal in Russia and Hungary, violent 
in Germany, sinister in France, determined in 
England and threatening enough in America, 
is a philosophy utterly incompatible with Chris- 
tianity. It lays down as its first principle that 
all the features and developments of human 
society originate in purely material conditions: 
laws, religions, literatures, philosophies, every- 
thing which we gather together into the word 
"society," is sprung from the material, the 
economic conditions, in which men find them- 
selves; and the whole movement of human 
history, its splendid moral and intellectual 
achievements, its ignorance and evil, its terrible 
wars and beneficent organizations of peace — 
the whole movement of history, which we have 
thought was produced by the free and striving 
will of men, is really the automatic and in- 



204 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

evitable effect of material conditions operating 
upon instinctive life. So that we are all caught 
in the grip of a vast, inexorable necessity, and 
our social order is determined for us, not by 
some Puritan God, not by our own insight and 
endeavor, but by the mindless, changeless, re- 
lentless mechanism of a godless world. That 
is a fundamental teaching of the multitu- 
dinous literature of socialism; that is the phi- 
losophy underlying the violence of the I. W. 
W.'s and much of law-abiding organized labor's 
hostility to the church. And the prophets of 
this atheistic interpretation of history point 
to the economic causes of the recent war: 
Germany's need for colonial outlet, for indus- 
trial expansion, for foreign markets and raw 
materials; the struggle between her and Eng- 
land for the trade of the East as necessary to 
their economic life; the falling birth-rate in 
France and her need of colonial reenforcements, 
of iron and other materials, in order to com- 
pete with Germany and England. They point 
to the whole complex series of economic con- 
siderations at the roots of the conflict, and claim 
the witness of facts to support their fatalistic 
theory. And seeing in the generation in which 
we live the rush and sweep of industrial revo- 
lution, feeling the ground of our old beliefs 
and ideals shaking in the storm, marking the 



THE INCALCULABLE 205 

spread of these mechanistic conceptions of per- 
sonality into the realms of individual thought 
and conduct, there are multitudes of earnest 
souls, frightened and in sorrow, saying in des- 
pair that Christianity is gone. 

History will tell another story. It will point 
back, for instance, to the social revolution of 
1789 in France, with its tremors running through 
all Europe, and bid us watch the confusion and 
tragedy of that tempestuous time, when the 
ancient institutions of what had been the most 
powerful monarchy in the world went down in 
the earthquake of the reign of terror; when the 
crushed common man, the lowest and most 
debased peasant, rose in mad desperation and 
flung down autocracy and all it had seemed 
to mean; had driven out priests, despoiled the 
altars and repudiated the church; had even 
set up a new, improvised worship of humanity. 
The world then was full of those who said in 
all sincerity — statesmen, poets, common people 
— people who said, some in exultation, some in 
sorrow, that Christianity was surely gone from 
the wrecked and shaken structure of society. 
History will go still further back and point to 
the philosophers preceding the French Revolu- 
tion, whose principles were the sole explosive 
force of the Revolution; those keen, cold, 
cynical minds, that found no place for God, or 



206 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

the conventions of morality; that reduced hu- 
manity's best and noblest institutions and con- 
ceptions to purely natural products, and made 
the mighty progress of history but the march of 
unguided humanity pushing on from an un- 
known starting point to a goal no greater than 
itself. It would have been difficult then not 
to suppose, from the facts in sight, that Chris- 
tianity was gone. 

Yet out of that same storm-swept and 
atheistic century rose the Wesleyan revival in 
England, with its message of the witness of the 
Spirit, the forgiveness of sins, the freedom of 
the soul, the immanence of God, to save Eng- 
land from the tragedy that broke on France. 
And one cannot but wonder whether the steady 
decline of France in population, in strength, 
in the undramatic virility that marks national 
greatness, is not somehow connected with the 
fact that for so long a time so large a proportion 
of her people have been practically indifferent 
where they have not been hostile to the per- 
sonal influences of religion; and whether the 
strength and growth and soberness of England 
have not their roots in her religious temper and 
tradition. If it be true, as we are being told 
by Protestant leaders, that in France to-day 
is the most quick and earnest response to 
evangelical religion the nation has ever shown, 



THE INCALCULABLE 207 

it is but another emphasis on the same truth. 
It had been supposed that Christianity was 
gone; but nevertheless it remains. There is, 
says history, an incalculable element which 
keeps it amid the ruins of the social structures 
from which it might seem easily to have fled. 

So that if the past has any meaning for us at 
all, it is that we need not lose hope or confidence 
in these days when the outlook may seem dark 
for all that we have counted dear in faith and 
experience. Neither the wreckage of the war, 
nor the bitter animosity of the industrial revo- 
lution roaring on toward ever so critical an 
issue, nor the subtle, irreligious spirit of much 
modern culture, need frighten us. Christianity 
is not gone. We may count upon that incal- 
culable element by which it has always endured. 

II 

For what is that incalculable element, the 
effect of which the jailer discovered but which 
itself he did not apprehend, in the character 
and conduct of the apostles? He doubtless 
knew that they were propagandists of a new 
religion; but that made no impression upon 
him, for the Roman empire was full of different 
sects; Rome and the Romans were tolerant 
of all faiths and sought to make them so many 
bonds by which to unite the various alien 



208 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

peoples to the empire. Rome's contention 
against the Christians was not on account of 
their religion but because they were misunder- 
stood to aim at the temporal overthrow of the 
government. Coming to details, the jailer 
doubtless knew of the demoniac girl who had 
been delivered from her affliction, for it was 
the vindictiveness of her masters which was 
the cause of the apostles' arrest. He knew of 
the teaching and message the apostles ex- 
pounded. He might have calculated, in other 
words, on their creed; he could have appre- 
hended easily what we would now call their 
social contribution. What he could not reckon 
on was Christ. 

For Christianity from the beginning was not 
merely the religion of a record. It was not the 
religion of a code or a social conduct. It was 
from the beginning the religion of a Person 
and the Person from the very beginning was 
inseparable from the religion. The jailer could 
not calculate on the personal Christ; on the 
mystery not of Christian belief but of Christian 
experience. It was that which empowered Paul 
and Silas to sing out of their suffering in the 
night, and the mystery was not simply that 
they sang, but that the quality of the singing 
was different from any ever heard in those 
old cells. In that beautiful book of Walter 



THE INCALCULABLE 209 

Pater's, the Life of Marius the Epicurean, in 
that fine pagan world of the second century, 
there is a scene where Marius and his companion 
have entered the courtyard of the villa of their 
Christian friends and hear singing, but of a 
new kind. It was, as Pater says, the expres- 
sion "not altogether of mirth, yet of a wonder- 
ful happiness, the blithe expansion of a joyful 
soul, in people upon whom some all-subduing 
experience had wrought heroically, and who 
still remembered . . . the hour of a great deliver- 
ance." And at the heart of that experience, 
and the heart of the song because he is the 
source of the deliverance, is Christ. That is 
what differentiates Christianity from all other 
religions, and from those excrescences which 
have sprung up in its name. You may take 
Mohammed away from Mohammedanism; but 
if the Koran is left, the religion is as good as 
ever. It makes no difference whether your 
Chinaman ever heard of Confucius if he holds 
the precepts of Confucius. And in our own 
time and place it is not Mrs. Eddy who is 
important in Christian Science, it is Science 
and Health. Mrs. Eddy is dead and her dis- 
ciples are quarreling over the profits of the 
business; while Christian Scientists, on the dubi- 
ous authority of Science and Health, still claim 
that there is no death. But the heart of Chris- 



210 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

tianity is Christ, and without him there is 
nothing else. 

Of course, then, Christianity is incalculable, 
for Christ is not merely a person; he is the one 
Person of the kind, the express image of the 
Godhead bodily. The earliest representations 
of the crucifixion show Christ on the cross alive 
and erect, to indicate that he cannot die. There 
is no other like him. When men are credulous 
or fearful enough to suppose that the social 
havoc of war means the absence or the end of 
Christianity, they not only forget the lesson 
of history, they ignore the character of God. 
The institutions, the conceptions, the social 
structure which humanity has slowly built in 
its free, heroic struggle up the slopes of time, 
may be rent and wrecked by tempests born of 
the clash of human wills and human wicked- 
ness; but Christ is not incarnate in institutions \f 
but in life, and the moving spirit of Christ sur- 
vives the changing institutions in which, for 
the time, life made its home. One can go farther 
and say that the very changes may be part of 
his larger operation. As the author of the 
letter to the Hebrews wrote of the breakdown 
of the old Hebrew symbolism in contact with 
Christian reality, "He taketh away the first 
that he may establish the second." 

For it was to a wrecked and crumbling 



THE INCALCULABLE 211 

society that Christ came. And the noblest 
structure of Christian civilization was built 
upon the wreckage of a world whose ideals, 
institutions and order had gone down amid 
the desperation and despair of men. The story 
of Christianity, not only in the past but to-day, 
is a story of moral miracle. One of the most- 
quoted illustrations is worth quoting again. 
If you have read Charles Darwin's earliest ac- 
count of the Patagonians whom he visited as 
a young man, in his scientific researches, you 
will remember that he gave his deliberate 
judgment that they were a race beyond re- 
demption, impossible to civilize, and socially, 
mentally, morally hopeless. But one day in 
London a boy-waif was discovered on what, in 
the Church calendar, is Saint Thomas's Day; 
he was found between two of the London 
bridges; and so at the foundling hospital he 
got his name, Thomas Bridges. Pass over a 
few years, and the foundling Thomas Bridges 
is a missionary in Patagonia. Pass over a few 
years more, and Charles Darwin is again visit- 
ing Patagonia and taking note of the marvelous 
changes in the people, their customs, character, 
and life; and when he thought over what he 
saw, he sent his financial subscription to the 
missionary society which had sent Thomas 
Bridges out, saying that the impossible had 



212 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

been accomplished. At every stage of modern 
civilization, whether it be among the ruins of 
the Roman world or the primitive savagery 
of contemporary heathenism, you come face to 
face with the incalculable Christ; and if the past 
has any voice by which to assure the present, 
any light by which to illumine the pathway of 
to-day and the promise of to-morrow, it is a 
voice to affirm and a light to disclose the pres- 
ence of the incalculable Christ living, uncon- 
querable, amid what we think are the wrecked 
and ruined institutions of the social life. 
"Therefore will we not fear, though the earth 

do change, and though the mountains be 

shaken into the heart of the seas; 
"Though the waters thereof roar and be 

troubled, 
"Though the mountains shake with the swelling 

thereof." 

Ill 

But now, while all this may or may not be 
interesting, it is quite futile if we go no further. 
For while we talk learnedly about Christianity 
and the incalculable element in it, for any 
practical concerns there is no such thing as 
Christianity. We give names to these abstrac- 
tions simply for intellectual convenience, but we 
can never get farther than the names. We speak 



THE INCALCULABLE 213 

of species, for instance, but no one ever saw a 
species. All we can ever see is a number of 
individuals with constant resemblances in struc- 
ture. Take the word "life." You never saw 
life. You never touched it. You never heard 
it. You can never find it. We speak grandly 
and positively about life; but it is an abstrac- 
tion, a name we give to an utterly inaccessible 
conception. All we can ever get hold of is 
living creatures. It is the same with Chris- 
tianity. We speak of it as a historic fact; but 
we can never find it. We talk of its creed, 
its characteristics, its energy, its institutions; 
but no one ever saw, felt, heard, or touched 
Christianity. What we do have, to see and 
hear and touch and feel and study, is Christians; 
and the incalculable element in Christianity 
is, after all, the incalculable element in Chris- 
tians. That was what amazed the Philippian 
jailer — not Christianity but these two Chris- 
tians; and what he did not and could not take 
into account, was not the unknown element 
in their belief or fellowship, but the unknown 
element in themselves. 

So that I should miss the main point of all 
that I ought to say this morning if I were to 
lead your minds across these broad fields of 
society and the world-at-large and not come 
home to yourselves with the real message. 



214 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Christianity will never escape from the world, 
however shattered the institutions of society 
may be, as long as Christians retain Christ. 
And the real problem confronting us this 
morning is not how to keep Christianity in the 
war- wrecked and revolution-broken world; but 
how to keep Christ for ourselves. Our socially 
minded generation regards all thoughts of our 
own religious life as selfish and would have us 
forget ourselves wholly in our ministry to 
others; but no social ministry can be better 
than one's own experience. And it is worth 
remembering that when the seventy disciples 
whom Jesus had sent out to spread the gospel 
of the Kingdom returned to him saying, "Lord, 
even the demons are subject to us in thy name," 
Jesus answered, "Nevertheless in this rejoice 
not, . . . but rejoice that your names are writ- 
ten in heaven." The criminal tragedy of the 
war has swept the world, the sinister atheism 
of the social revolution endangers it, not be- > 
cause Christianity failed, but because Chris- » 
tians failed; and if we Christians are to have 
any part in the redemption of the present order, 
it will be only as we quit reorganizing abstract 
Christianity and set ourselves to remake con- 
crete Christians. 

The Christians whom, first of all, we have 
to remake are ourselves. It is ourselves who 



THE INCALCULABLE 215 

first must experience, in ample and compelling 
fashion, the unescaping Christ. And I have 
no doubt that the one question which most of 
us most intensely ask ourselves, or would ask, 
is, How can we gain, or apprehend, or experi- 
ence Christ in that constant and unmistakable 
reality? How can we come, in the unity of the 
faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, 
unto the measure of the stature of the fullness 
of Christ? This is the answer: By making 
personal life an adventure upon the incalcula- 
ble element in Christ. The incalculable Christ 
is not simply to be discovered; he is to be used. 
We shall have him in reality as we live upon the 
reality of him. 

Let me illustrate that. Here is the funda- 
mental difficulty of our personal lives, the con- 
flict and persistence of sin. When we would 
do good, evil is present with us. And it is that 
translated into terms of nations and their 
representatives which makes all misunder- 
standing, hatred, and war, and every iniquitous 
treaty of peace. It is that, within our own 
narrow personal experience, which cuts the 
nerve of our moral usefulness and our own 
sense of moral power. We not only are not 
what we want to be, we know that we are not 
what we could be. And the hopelessness of 
the situation is that we know that if we are ever 



216 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

going to be right, if we are ever going to be right 
with God, it must be not only away from sin, 
but amid our sin. How will we ever get through 
the paradox? By adventuring on the incal- 
culable element in Christ. It is the divine 
mystery of redemption. We cannot under- 
stand it, but we judge "that one died for all, 
therefore all died; . . . wherefore if any man 
is in Christ he is a new creature : the old things 
are passed away; behold, they are become new." 
And while it is true that when I would do good 
evil is present with me so that the good which 
I would I do not, but the evil which I would 
not that I do, yet it is no more I that do it 
but sin which dwelleth in me; and this is the 
incalculable thing, that there is no condemna- 
tion to them that are in Christ Jesus, for the 
law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made 
me free from the law of sin and death. Now, 
this is not to make light of sin or discount the 
tragedy of evil; it is to be inspired to the best 
life because we know that, for all the bite and 
bitterness of it, sin hath no more dominion 
over us. We didn't win the victory; we cannot 
explain how it was won; but the incalculable 
Christ has won it for us, and we have the right 
to live victorious lives. 

Or take the next grave problem of Christian 
men and women, the problem of suffering. It 



THE INCALCULABLE 217 

is the mystery of unmerited pain that shakes 
the faith and crumbles the consistency of too 
many lives that want to be Christian. And it is 
the conduct of Christians in these experiences 
which so devastate the lives of other men and 
women that bears most effective witness for 
or against the reality of Christ. There are 
men and women among those who read this 
page who know they have failed at this point. 
They have had agony of body, of mind, of af- 
fection; they have suffered much, or sorrowed 
terribly; and they have found no justification 
for it; and they have broken beneath their 
pain. The experience has been too much for 
them, and they know it. And there are others 
on the edge of tragedy who feel themselves 
already going down beneath it. They cannot 
stand it. Now there will be no victorious 
Christianity in the world until Christians are 
victorious in these experiences which most 
scarify the world. You cannot^ expect Chris- 
tianity to endure among the tragedies of tor- 
ture, loss, and agony in Russia, in Hungary, 
in starving Vienna, in Armenia, if you are not 
victorious in your sufferings in Kansas City, 
or New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago. It 
was in such experiences that primitive Chris- 
tianity made its most appealing witness. When 
the Christians at Lyons were being terribly 



218 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

persecuted, according to one of the early Chris- 
tian Fathers, of one of them it is written that 
"he neither uttered a groan nor any sound at 
all, but in his heart talked with God." Another 
refused to tell whence he came, or of what 
country he was, but to all questions answered, 
"I am Christ's." And of him it is written in 
his unspeakable tortures, that "Christ paining 
in him, set forth a copy to the rest, that there 
is nothing fearful, nothing painful, where the 
love of the Father overcomes." When you seek 
to explain it you come straight to this same 
incalculable element, Christ, and that great 
experience of St. Paul's when he sought the 
Lord thrice that the thorn in his flesh might 
depart from him. And the Lord said unto him, 
not that the thorn should depart, not that the 
suffering should cease, not even that it should 
be explained, but "My grace is sufficient for thee : 
for my strength is made perfect in weakness." 
There is the incalculable element again. 

Or, finally, take our recurrent desire for 
saintliness. I know that we are quick to resent 
any appeal to extra goodness by saying that 
we are not saints; but I know also that the 
deepest desire, unconfessed, of every Christian 
man and woman of us is to be saintly. There 
is a very practical reason as well, for imperfect 
saints are never going to make a perfect world. 



THE INCALCULABLE 219 

We want to be not only good but our best; 
and the deeper sadness of our personal lives 
as we touch it in our moments of grave intro- 
spection, is that we are not as good as we had 
hoped to be. And we know that we have just 
got to be saints some time. Every Methodist 
preacher when he stands before the Confer- 
ence to be received into full membership is 
asked, "Are you going on to perfection ?" It is 
a question life asks of every one, minister and 
layman alike; and our hopes answer that we 
are going on to perfection, and our hearts 
answer that we are not, but we want to. And 
our failure haunts us, and none of us but knows 
the dangerous and painful mood when he 
realizes from time to time that he is still failing. 
What is the use of the moral struggle? What 
is the use of this defeated loyalty? What is 
the use of the Christian confession? That is a 
mood we all know. And here, then, comes once 
more the reminder of the incalculable Christ. 
I do not know how I shall ever be what I 
ought to be, how I shall ever take my place 
among the spirits of the just made perfect, but 
here is the mystery as Paul writes it, the mys- 
tery which is Christ in you the hope of glory. 
It is the incalculable element in Christianity 
which has sustained Christians in those periods 
of social disruption; and it has sustained them 



220 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

only as it has sustained them in the disorders 
of their personal experience. If our day is, 
like those other days, to be renewed in Christian 
character and sincerity and vigor, it will be 
only as Christians renew themselves in their 
confusing and imprisoning experiences; only as 
we Christians shall renew ourselves in Christ- 
likeness amid the paradox of sin, the passion 
of suffering, the paralysis of moral despair. 
And we shall renew ourselves in this Christ- 
likeness only by making life once more an 
adventure upon the incalculable element in 
Christ; which is incalculable only in its methods; 
in its results as certain as God. In short, if 
we are to be redeemed men and women, we 
must begin consciously to live redeemed lives. 
If we are to be victorious men and women, we 
must adventure on our victory as already won 
for us. If we are to be saintly men and women, 
we must now walk as saints. No social earth- 
quake can justify our supposing Christ to have 
escaped from the world, or from us, if, like 
those Lyons martyrs, we dare answer all ex- 
perience with the confession, "I am Christ's," or 
answering not at all, still in our heart talk with 
God. For the incalculable Christ is the abiding 
Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and forever, 
and when Christ who is our life shall be mani- 
fested, then shall we also be manifested with him. 



VIII 
PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 



Then shall we know, if we follow on to know 
the Lord. — Rosea 6. 3. 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 

Among the most interesting accomplishments 
of photography are pictures taken at night or 
during a storm. The book of Hosea is very 
much like them. It is a photograph taken in 
a tempest. It is the product of a stormy time, 
and the storm thunders through the book. 
Ralph Waldo Trine, who is more clever at 
getting subjects than in saying anything worth 
while about them, has named one of his fustian 
volumes The Land of Living Men, though he 
has failed altogether to give credit for the 
title to William Morris, who used it years 
before Trine was heard of. But neither Trine 
nor Morris is within a world's length of the land 
of living men. Here is the true land of living 
men, the Bible. We think of its people as dim 
literary figures, but they are real folks. They 
lived and loved as we do; lived longer, and, if 
the records of the divorce courts are criteria, 
loved longer than a good many people nowadays 
do; they sang and suffered as we do; and they 
sinned. Perhaps the supreme power of the 
Bible is that it paints sin as not even a problem 
novelist would dare to do even to-day. And 
nowhere else in the Bible will you meet so 
223 



224 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

much sin all at once as in Hosea: "Hear the 
word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for 
the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabi- 
tants of the land, because there is no truth, 
nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. 
There is naught but swearing and breaking 
faith and killing, and stealing, and committing 
adultery; they break out, and blood toucheth 
blood." There is a fairly complete indictment 
— perjury, murder, theft, and immorality. If 
there had been newspapers in Jerusalem then, 
they would have called Hosea a muck-raker 
and said he was hurting the country. But 
Hosea went farther than simply to indict 
society at large. He found the men higher up. 
"Hear ye this, O ye priests, . . . for unto you 
pertaineth the judgment; for ye have been a 
snare at Mizpah and a net spread upon Tabor." 
"The princes of Judah are like them that 
remove the landmarks" — the oldest form of 
dishonesty and simpler than some of our con- 
temporary transactions. Here is a preacher 
who ought to have stuck to his text. But he 
didn't; he filled his preaching, and his book 
is filled, with this broken, vivid language; with 
challenge after challenge, and appeal after ap- 
peal. There are commands in it, and tears, 
and tragedy, and pathos; insolence and anger; 
crime and ignorance. There are sublime and 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 225 

fearful dialogues between a wayward people 
and an offended God. It is a great cross- 
section of superficial and sensual life, and care- 
less recreant feelings; social sin and individual 
apostasy, and reprobate priests and treacherous 
princes. It is a moving picture of the whole 
surge and stress of a generation that has lost 
its conscience and relaxed its moral earnestness. 

And then, in the very midst of it, you come 
across a prayer, so simple, so direct and ap- 
pealing, that the Christian Church has para- 
phrased it into one of its most beautiful hymns 
of conversion: "Come, and let us return unto 
the Lord; for he hath torn, and he will heal us; 
he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After 
two days he will revive us: in the third day 
he will raise us up, and we shall live in his 
sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to 
know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as 
the morning.' ' Or, as another version has it, 
"If we seek him we shall find him; — and he 
shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter 
and former rain upon the earth." 

Now, when you get to that prayer you are 
on one of the undecided battlefields of biblical 
scholarship; but I will not so much as mention 
any of the very real problems which are in- 
volved here. I simply lift up one of its gracious 
sentences, and set it before you as a fruitful 



226 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

and appealing invitation for this day, and the 
generation to which we belong: "Then shall 
we know, if we follow on to know the Lord." 

Then shall we know — know what? Ours is 
no ignorant age. Can Hosea, twenty-eight 
hundred years behind the times, teach us 
anything? If knowledge is necessary, we are 
the people. The children of to-day know a 
great deal more about some things than the 
men of yesterday. One of our high-school 
boys is better informed than a college graduate 
of Daniel Webster's day. The children are 
making toy airplanes that fly, X-ray cameras 
through which they can look at the bones of 
their own fingers and the domestic arrange- 
ments of a beetle; and Darwin and Wallace 
and Newton and Harvey and Galileo couldn't 
do that. The grammar-school boys know first 
aid to the injured, and sex facts their fathers 
would not talk about are part of their every- 
day work. Our own age has traveled more 
widely, discovered more laws, patented more 
processes, made more experiments, explored 
more mysteries than any age before it. Sixty 
years ago Phil Sheridan rode twenty miles and 
turned a rout into a victory; the other day 
France bought the patent of a gun to shoot 
one hundred and twenty miles; and one shell 
from it would have done for the whole battle 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 227 

Sheridan rode to save, and would have done 
it before he could have climbed into his saddle. 
A Silesian Abbot made some experiments with 
sweet peas, seventy-five years ago, and now 
men are planting seeds and breeding stock to 
get whatever characteristics they want. Phys- 
icists are dividing the atom into eighteen hun- 
dred electrons and will tell you how much 
electricity each electron is carrying. Benjamin 
Franklin got his name into history by flying a 
kite with a wire running to a key in a bottle 
to catch electricity; but he couldn't do any- 
thing with the electricity after he caught it. 
My boy during his leisure hours has made an 
instrument with a wire run out of a window 
and he hears the wireless messages crossing 
the continent on every side. Men to-day have 
harnessed Franklin's lightning till a man in 
New York can interrupt his wife in San Fran- 
cisco; and the government can give orders to 
a ship anywhere in the world in a matter of an 
hour or so. When we first went to school 
there were patches of white on our United 
States maps called The Great American Desert; 
and we were told they were areas of drought 
and famine. Now the farmers have grains and 
irrigation for any kind of land and the droughts 
and famines are almost forgotten. When I 
first saw a map of Africa, most of it was a 



228 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

great black space labeled "Unexplored Terri- 
tory." Now there is a railroad there carrying 
the commerce of five continents; there are 
mighty rivers harnessed to a thousand mill- 
wheels; there are churches, schools, colleges, 
and the life of civilized and artistic men. We 
haven't a very serious League of Nations, but 
we are leagued together in the very bonds of 
life, so that our newspapers report the daily 
biography of the globe and our markets reflect 
the conditions anywhere around the world. 
Yesterday's intrigue of Balkan politicians are 
told to-day in New York clubs; the love affairs 
of moving-picture stars are rehearsed in Boston 
almost simultaneously; and to-day's weather in 
the Argentine will affect the price of bread in 
Chicago. Our surgeons can cut nerves and 
reunite them; they have operated successfully 
on the heart and have taken bullets out of 
brains. Our physicians are so familiar with 
microbes that they can call them by their first 
names. Men yet alive have untwisted the 
tangled disorders of the deaf and dumb, with 
the stroke of a knife have altered the moral 
tendencies of the hitherto incorrigible. We are 
making new species of plants and animals; 
writing the recondite history of the mental life; 
marching with invincible and awesome step 
into the very secrets of nature. We know 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 229 

more about the campaigns of Julius Csesar than 
his contemporaries did; and are rediscovering 
the life of empires buried and forgotten three 
thousand years ago. What is the use of point- 
ing out an Old Testament text written by 
some dead hand moldered into dust these eight 
and twenty centuries and telling us that we 
shall know? We know a great deal already. 

Well, the age to which Hosea wrote and 
spoke was an age that knew something also. 
They were not an inventing people, but they 
were not an ignorant people. They knew how 
to drive sharp bargains. They knew how to 
intrigue with other nations. They knew how 
to juggle justice. They knew how to go through 
the forms of their ritual religion and still live 
their same old selfish, sinful lives. They knew 
enough to produce this mighty literature which 
for centuries has been the hope and light and 
consolation of the best minds and spirits of the 
world. They were just a handful, compared 
to the population around them, but those popu- 
lations are long since forgotten and the handful 
is remembered. They were no wild and savage 
tribes, but men and women with more than the 
germs of greatness in them. Some of them had 
far horizons and wide outlooks. They were 
men and women like ourselves; different in race 
and feature and speech and clothes, but, after 



230 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

all, just as we are in those fundamental elements 
which make our humanity. 

And yet God came to them, crying through 
the lips of the prophet, "My people are de- 
stroyed for lack of knowledge." How could 
that be? How could they know and yet be 
destroyed for lack of knowledge? Because they 
knew many things, but they did not know the 
right thing. And nothing that we know, of 
which they were ignorant, would have helped 
them. You cannot imagine a single item or 
all the items of our modern knowledge which 
would have changed the essential character of 
this ancient people. They knew many things, 
but what they did not know was God. It was 
lack of that knowledge which was destroying 
them. For the Old Testament, in fact the en- 
tire Bible, has a conception of knowledge as 
vastly more than an accumulation of discovered 
facts or laws. "The fear of the Lord is the 
beginning of wisdom." And then there is that 
mighty foreword of Isaiah, "The spirit of the 
Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom 
and understanding, the spirit of counsel and 
might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of 
the Lord." They knew facts and forms and 
laws and processes, but they had not the Spirit 
of the Lord. They knew many things, but 
they did not know God. And that was the 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 231 

only knowledge that would save them from 
themselves. 

Then you come to this prayer I have just 
read, and if I may step out upon the battle- 
field of scholarship and take sides for a moment, 
the terrible defect with this winsome and beau- 
tiful petition I have read as the text was that 
the people thought all they had to do was to 
pray it; all they had to do was to turn to 
Jehovah. They thought he was always stand- 
ing at their side, a patient, servant sort of God, 
ready to run whenever they called him. "We 
shall know, if we follow on to know the Lord. 
If we seek him, we shall find him." It is won- 
derfully true, but they had only the words of 
it. It was a working hypothesis, but they did 
not work it. They would know if they followed 
on, but they did not follow on. 

I 

Take, then, this phrase and fragment from 
this old petition, and without further explana- 
tion, apply it to our own life. We shall know, 
if we follow on. Knowledge is not a discovery; 
it is a discipline. It is not an accumulation; 
it is a pursuit. Children in grammar schools 
and sometimes bright young people in college 
look forward to the time when they will be 
through their education, when they shall be 



232 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

done learning. Knowledge, to them, is a goal 
to be reached, a commodity to be acquired, a 
distance to be traveled. And then they find 
that it is a goal that recedes, a capacity which 
enlarges, and instead of distance traveled, a 
vista that ever lengthens but never ends. 
When, therefore, I read you this unflinching 
declaration to the end, "We shall know, if we 
follow on to know the Lord," I bring an em- 
phasis to our religious life and thinking we 
shall do well to bear in mind. We speak much 
of modern thought, and read a great deal about 
our age as being dominated by the theory of 
development. We have volumes and almost 
libraries devoted to the rewriting of all the past, 
and the explanation of all the present, in the 
light of the evolutionary conception. We talk 
of how Darwin has laid his hands on every 
area of human interest, till history, science, 
commerce, biology, religion, and the rest are 
all to be understood as the product of inter- 
minable growth. But here, some twenty-five 
hundred years before Darwin was dreamed of, 
Hosea has seen and recognized the law of devel- 
opment in religious life and knowledge. And 
it is here that whole segments of modern re- 
ligious thought and practice have failed to be 
either scientific or scriptural, and individual 
souls in their zeal to assert God's mercy have 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 233 

done dishonor to his common sense. They 
have emphasized conversion until it occupied 
the entire field of vital religious fact. They 
have been so zealous for a definite and de- 
lineated beginning that they have forgotten 
there was anything begun. They have been con- 
verted, and claim forever to know God. They 
have mistaken an introduction for an acquaint- 
ance. It will take you years to know a man; 
but they would know God in a moment. And 
this false emphasis is responsible for much of 
the formal and meaningless religious profes- 
sion which has no issue in practical and ex- 
perimental life. Religion is not a secret society 
into which one is initiated through the mystery 
of conversion. It is a life into which one is 
born; and after the birth one must live. I 
have a very loyal Presbyterian friend who 
speaks frequently about the perseverance of 
the saints, and recalls the comforting doctrine 
of Calvinism, "Once in grace, always in grace"; 
and occasionally he expresses envy of my 
Methodist advantages in being able to fall and 
get back again. Well, I thank God a Methodist 
can get back again after he falls, though I 
regret that there are so many Methodists who 
seem familiar with only that tenet of their 
faith; and I believe in the perseverance of the 
saints. Only the saints who persevere do their 



234 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

own persevering. We shall know if we fol- 
low on. 

But that means also that we must make a 
start, and here is where, to quite the contrary 
view from that which I have been indicating, 
these theories of religious life as wholly a cul- 
ture and an attitude and the like, break down. 
Certain present-day minds have found them- 
selves too refined and gentle to believe in any 
doctrine of conversion at all. Evil, to them, 
is a lingering fragment of our animal nature 
for which we are not at all responsible, and 
which will slough off if we just groom our 
temperament sufficiently. They practice, and 
primp their souls with Channing's sweet- 
sounding fallacy about letting "the spiritual, 
unbidden and unconscious, grow up through 
the common," and they forget that you can 
never get a growth without a root; you harvest 
no crops where you have planted no seeds. 
The beginning of it is not the whole religious 
life, but you'll get no religious life without 
the beginning. I do not profess to know how 
to define conversion. It will be different for 
every soul. For this man it will be an intel- 
lectual revision; to another it will be the sur- 
render of the will; to a third it will be an emo- 
tional revolution; to still another it will be a 
social reform. In a child or a recluse it will 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 235 

give place to a normal and gracious develop- 
ment in the positive sympathies and affections, 
of the things that are lovely and of good report. 
But it is a start. And we shall not be able to 
follow on until we have started in the way. 

We shall know, if we follow on. That means 
also that we must find the way. Hosea stood 
upon a narrow and almost an uninviting path. 
It was a path hedged in with laws. It was 
reddened with the blood of many sacrifices. 
It was heavy with the hovering smell of in- 
cense. It was the path of social justice and 
ecclesiastical propriety and political integrity. 
It was a good path and it could be traveled, 
but it was very narrow. There was very little 
scenery, and no large outlook toward the hori- 
zons. To-day, on the other hand, we find 
ourselves upon a broad highway. There are 
enriching aspirations of the past, the deepening 
experiences of the centuries descending on us, 
the congenialities and cultures of the religious 
life, the enjoyments of organized fellowship, 
and the stimulus and comfort of ordered wor- 
ship. We have the church, with its historic 
witness in the creeds, its impressive authority 
in the sanctities it gives to the home, its mystic 
and exalting sacraments, the imperishable hope 
and consolation it speaks above our dead. 
There is the sifted witness of the Scriptures, 



236 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

disclosing in an impartial record of individual 
and national and social life the unfailing prin- 
ciples of spiritual and moral law. There is 
the tested record of the experiences and testi- 
monies of men and women, approved by the 
experiences of all ages since then, as containing 
a veritable revelation of God and a breviary 
of approach and devotion to him. And beyond 
all the fragments of this which Hosea and his 
age might have, we have that for which in 
his most impassioned and uplifted hours Hosea 
could do no more than pray; we have in the 
Gospels the revelation of God completing and 
enriching all that the older dispensation had, 
the promise and security of experiences and 
knowledge beyond their hopes, and the ex- 
position and direction of life toward the con- 
summate knowledge and experience, of which 
the highest visions of the elder prophets were 
but shadows. 

And the total effect of all these — the sym- 
pathies, the fellowships, the tradition and wit- 
ness of the past, the church and the Scriptures 
— is the presence in life to-day, as a historic 
figure, as a social influence, as a personal in- 
spiration and hope, as a living spirit, of Jesus 
Christ, once the Incarnate and now the Im- 
manent Son and Revelation of God. "I am the 
Way." "No one cometh unto the Father but 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 237 

by me." "I am the door; by me if any man 
shall enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go 
in and out, and find pasture." We shall know, 
if we follow on to know the Lord. We can 
make a start, for we have found the Way. 
We have Christ. We shall know the Lord if 
we know him; and we shall know him if we 
follow on. 

II 

We shall know what Christ is; and that is no 
small knowledge. Just now a large portion of 
the world is quite at sea concerning him. There 
are wise men who have given much of their 
lives to the study of what we call sacred things, 
who would tell us that Christ is a theological 
figure created by the Church; that he is an 
ideal Man developed in the mind of humanity 
by the wistful longings of men for a perfection 
and a peace they could not achieve; that Jesus 
the historic figure was a Galilsean peasant- 
prophet with a message of singular sincerity 
and appeal, and a personal life of peculiar 
charm and winsomeness; that he was martyred 
by an offended ecclesiastical system, and after 
his death the devotion of his disciples and 
friends gave rise to a body of traditions, which 
the centuries have solidified into a doctrine of 
supernatural character and mission. 



238 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Now, some of you have every reason to be 
asking yourselves: "Why is this almost un- 
christian belief rehearsed to us? We do not 
think that way" — which is true enough. But 
there are men and women among us who have 
felt the practical effects of this belief, though 
they themselves knew nothing of it. They have 
participated in it, though they did not so much 
as name it. Ever since the outbreak of the 
Great War we have been hearing about the 
collapse of Christianity and the wreck of civili- 
zation and the proven failure of the church 
because of the carnage across the sea. The 
stupendous upheaval of what seemed to be a 
settling and permanent peace, the disregard of 
what had been inviolate sanctuaries of art and 
religion, the ruthless violation of what had been 
the binding covenants of national honor, the 
merciless atrocities of lust and blood, all en- 
acted in the pitiless operations of nations calling 
themselves Christian and crying to the Father 
of Christ to bless their military advance — all 
of that has had its effect, and we have trembled 
at the accusations that Christ is unreal. 

What is the reason for this immediate wither- 
ing of so much of the world's faith? It was 
based upon an inadequate knowledge. The 
wise who declare that the Christ of theology 
and the churches is an ideal figure developed 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 239 

out of the aspirations of men for a perfection 
they could not reach have gone to books alone 
for their knowledge. They have known a great 
deal about him, but they have not known him. 
They have what they call the historical imagi- 
nation and the critical insight, but they have 
not what Paul called Christ within, the hope 
of glory. What is the reason that so many 
men, not scholars, but men appraising as best 
they could the meaning of these tumultuous 
and revolutionary times, have so easily lost 
their sense of Christ's reality? Is it not that 
they built their confidence in Christ upon other 
and quite as inadequate knowledge? They saw 
cathedrals vibrant with his name. They re- 
marked customs softened by his spirit. They 
realized the restraint of laws developed from 
his ideals. They felt the amenities of life 
sprung from his commands. They saw, in 
short, the outreach of his influence; they did 
not see him. One and all, the wise men and 
the practical men alike, forgot the inexorable 
principle that "divine truths reach us through 
the heart," that "we must love divine things 
in order to know them." One and all, they failed 
to find the road on which alone Christ can be 
discovered. They knew, but they did not 
know enough. They knew, but they did not 
know in the right way. "That I may know 



240 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

him," wrote Paul, who really did know him, 
"and the power of his resurrection, and the 
fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed 
unto his death." That kind of knowledge cost 
Paul everything that he had. He got it, not 
in any schools or out of any books, but out of 
heaven itself. It was not taught to him ; it was 
born in him. That knowledge is not informa- 
tion; it is experience. It is not theology; it is 
religion. It comes not by a process of logic 
but by a dedication of life. It may begin in 
a burst of vision, or a strange warming of the 
heart, or a bitter surrender of the will, or a new 
apprehension of truth, but it leads on and on 
down the years of commonplace and toilsome 
things, through tasks and trials, through the 
accumulating happiness of gracious days and 
the thickening shadows of inevitable pain and 
grief; it leads on to a deepening and indefinable 
adventure of the spirit in which one comes to 
know, not so much more about the life of 
Christ, but "the love of Christ which passeth 
knowledge," and to be filled, in ever- widening 
amplitudes of faith and feeling, "unto all the 
fullness of God." The New Testament, as I 
think it was the late Dr. Gunsaulus somewhere 
said, is never true for long as an historical docu- 
ment, unless it is true as a record of present 
experience. 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 241 

III 

Then, again, if we really follow on to know 
the Lord, we shall know what Christ did; and 
we shall learn and undertake what he would 
have us do. And I read here that "He went 
about doing good"; and I read here those 
searching but neglected words of his in which 
he makes very clear that, whatever the judg- 
ment of God may be in the life to come, it will 
be based very largely upon what we have done 
to our fellow men in the life that now is. "Inas- 
much as ye did it unto one of these, my breth- 
ren" — inasmuch as ye have fed the hungry 
and given drink to the thirsty and welcomed 
the stranger and clothed the naked and visited 
the sick and cheered the prisoner — "ye did it 
unto me." And I recall that striking question 
of Saint John, "He that loveth not his brother 
whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom 
he hath not seen?" It is long since past the 
day when a preacher needed to defend the 
modern social enthusiasm. There was the day 
when we had to stem high tides of criticism 
from quite sincere and godly men and women 
in the church, that the business of the church 
and the preacher was to save souls and not to 
step aside into worldly matters like housing 
codes, and pure-milk campaigns, and minimum- 
wage laws, and employers' liabilities, and anti- 



242 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

slum crusades, and the protection of girls and 
children from oppressive labor, and the like. 
They used to tell us we were prostituting the 
pulpit and bringing the gospel into disrepute, 
and so forth — principally and so forth. We 
have gotten past all that now; and our gener- 
ation, with all its errancy and distorted vision 
and frivolity of exaggerated amusements, is 
passionate in its protest against the unnecessary 
inequalities of fortune and the injustices of 
the social order. We thought, of course, that 
we were pioneers in the recognition that God 
is a God of social righteousness and that re- 
ligion must prove itself in our human relation- 
ships or our aspirations Godward will get 
nowhere. But we are no pioneers. We are 
belated pilgrims; we are Robinson Crusoes, 
imagining ourselves the first inhabitants of the 
island of social vision, only to discover that the 
place to which we have so lately come was 
occupied long before us, not by savages but 
by seers and sages at whose feet we may sit 
down to learn. We talk about our modern 
recognition of social justice as an imperative 
element in vital religion; but here is Jeremiah, 
six hundred years before our Christian era, 
thundering out upon the luxurious king, Jehoi- 
akim, the example of his great father Josiah, 
"Did not thy father eat and drink, and do 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 243 

justice and righteousness ?" There was no 
tyranny or oppression or corruption of govern- 
ment there. "He judged the cause of the poor 
and needy." "Was not this to know me? saith 
the Lord." Why, Jeremiah went further than 
the most of our most impassioned social cham- 
pions and servants have gone. Our modern 
folk — socialists and settlement workers, and 
the like — brave and sacrificial spirits as they 
sometimes are, too much have thought their 
social ministry was a substitute for religion, 
when it is at its best only as an expression of 
religion. They have considered it the object 
of life's journey, when it is only a road to the 
journey's end. And what is thus true of those 
who give their lives to the prosecution of the 
public welfare is true also for those whose social 
activities are rather the overflow of lives pre- 
occupied with other things. Given an experi- 
ence of Christ as the revelation of God, and 
it is on the highway of social sincerity and help- 
fulness that we shall come to know him, for the 
acquaintance with God which begins in experi- 
ence ripens in action, the knowledge which is 
inaugurated as a process of life within deepens 
as a habit of life without. It was said of the 
people of the Bronte region that they were 
strong religionists, only their religion did not 
work down into their lives; and, according to 



244 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Froude, religion, in Carlyle's day, had become 
a thing of emotion flowing over into benevo- 
lence as a substitute for justice. We shall know 
the Lord if we follow on to know; but we shall 
have to follow, not only through the aisles and 
arches of our worship and up the gracious slopes 
of an enriching experience of faith and affec- 
tion and strange warmings of the heart, but 
on the roads and furrows of our daily work. 
We shall come to know the Lord as we go 
about doing good; as we prevent evil, as we 
remove the accessories to temptation, as we 
deliver the distressed, not simply from their 
impoverishment and pain, but from the social 
causes and occasions of their impoverishment 
and pain. "I got my vision of Christ," said 
a Christly worker to me one day, "when I began 
to do something for the people everybody else 
seemed to neglect." 

IV 

But even now we are not at our journey's 
end. An experience and a habit, a life within 
and a life without, to know what Christ is and 
to do what Christ would have us do — these 
are great and gracious highways and on them 
we shall come to know our Lord. But are they 
all for to-day, and are they only for to-day? 
Is there no to-morrow in them? Aye, they are 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 245 

for to-day, but they have to-morrow in them, 
too. The tragedy of our knowledge here on 
earth is that we seem to lay it down at last. 
Falstaff goes drifting out his braggart life of 
lust and babbles o' green fields, and the wisest 
of us seem to leave our learning as children 
leave their scattered toys at night and climb 
reluctantly the stairway to their beds. 

Knowledge is a pursuit, but it is a pursuit 
that seems to end in ignorance at last; it is a 
journey, but a journey which seems at night 
to come to nothing. And if we have only 
hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men 
most miserable. But this is life — this is life 
eternal, and it is Christ himself who tells us 
— this is life eternal, that they should know 
the only true God and Jesus Christ. We shall 
know, if we follow on to know the Lord; and 
we shall have to follow for all eternity. It 
is not only an endless obligation; it is an im- 
mortal life. This means that we shall have to 
know now what Christ has promised. It is 
not the knowledge of demonstrated fact; it is the 
knowledge of invincible faith. It is not the 
certainty of proof; it is the certainty of hope. 
And that is the inevitable development of 
knowing what Christ is; for, as Dr. Jowett has 
somewhere put it, "The finest reason a man 
can give for a spiritual hope is a spiritual ex- 



246 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

perience." I was rereading the other day that 
bit of melodious exaggeration called Ingersoll's 
Oration at His Brother's Grave, and I came 
across this characteristic sentence in it: "For 
whether in midsea or among the breakers of 
the farther shore, a wreck must mark at last 
the end of each and all." It is a metaphorical 
and lugubrious lie, but how could Ingersoll get 
anything else? He followed on, but he did not 
follow on to know, and he did not follow on the 
right way. He followed only the wisp of 
transient fame and the glimmer of his self- 
esteem. He traveled a highway of large- 
sounding words and was more interested in 
saying something than in having something to 
say. He knew a great many things, but most 
of them were not so. What he announced as 
truths were not even honest guesses at the 
riddle of life; they were cultivated prejudices 
which were too profitable in the life that is 
to be disturbed on behalf of any life that is 
to be. Of course, for such a man there could 
be only a wreck at the end. It was wreck or 
retribution. And no argument could have 
changed Ingersoll; no explanation could have 
quickened a hope within him. It takes an 
experience to substantiate a hope, and he had 
no experience. When, however, I follow an 
experience and a habit toward the knowledge 



PURSUIT AND KNOWLEDGE 247 

of the Lord, I can find no wreck in either sea 
or breaker, but the path of the just that shineth 
more and more, for when I know whom I have 
believed, I am very certainly persuaded that 
he is able to keep that which I have committed 
unto him against that day. 

And this knowledge, which is Christian hope, 
is not only the product of an experience, it 
is the logic of the habit of life. He went about 
doing good; so are we to do. But when did 
he stop? I do not read that he ever will stop. 
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." 
Have you thought that when the perfect social 
order shall arrive the helpful tasks of men will 
then be done? Have you thought that when 
you shall lay your body in its quiet grave and 
what we call time shall be no more, nothing 
will be left to do? I read it here that yonder 
"His servants serve him. ,, It takes endless 
time for an endless task, and as one of our 
great living seers has said it, "the revelation 
of man's endless career comes through his voca- 
tion as a servant of the ideal.' ' 

Here, then, out of this far-off and perhaps 
misunderstood petition of a distant day, we 
lift the Christian Hope. We shall know, if 
we follow on to know the Lord. We shall 
know him here, for experience and life shall 
bring us revelation. But, thank God, we shall 



248 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

know him there. At best we cannot here be 
satisfied. The infelicities of life and the tragic 
weakness of our mortality make our knowledge 
now but partial at the most. We know him, 
but doubts will come. We believe him, but 
clouds arise. We have his reenforcement, but 
we have the battle too. We have his conso- 
lations, but the sorrows are very deep. We 
have his pardon and his promises, but tempta- 
tions still beleaguer us, and while he liveth to 
make intercession we keep sinning the sins for 
which he intercedes. The best we can have now 
is this hopeful, prayerful, but partial knowledge, 
this interrupted vision and beleaguered faith. 
But then we shall truly know. "Now we see 
through a glass darkly; but then face to face." 
And I read that there we do even more than 
know one another, for I read that his servants 
not only serve him, but they see his face. 
O, we shall know if we follow on to know the 
Lord. We shall know him, and we know that 
we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 



IX 

THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 



And whosoever shall compel thee to go one 
mile, go with him two. — Matthew 5. 41 . 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 

I have often wondered in recent months what 
Theodore Roosevelt thought about these words; 
they have the flavor of what, in his less reticent 
moods, he would have called the mollycoddle 
ideal. That is, they have that flavor if you 
take them literally. Of course, when I speak 
in that fashion, I open the door to a host of 
eager criticisms. Did not Jesus know just 
what he was talking about? Doesn't he always 
mean what he says? No one has any right to 
take the plain words of Christ and read into 
them anything except what they say. All. of 
that is true enough. Jesus undoubtedly knew 
what he was talking about; but that is not to 
say that we always know what he was talking 
about, and we shall never know all that he 
meant until we do know what he was talking 
about when he meant it. These words are plain 
enough; but plain words sometimes have the 
profoundest meaning. They are often like 
some of the indefinite things Longfellow men- 
tions in his Psalm of Life — they are not what 
they seem. You can take these words with 
absolute literalness, and there are some minds 
that can never do anything else with them, 
251 



252 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

but what a bog that will get us into! If these 
words are to be taken literally, on their face 
value, and with no exploration into their 
fundamental context and spirit, then they may 
mean that if a jitney carries us a mile beyond 
our corner we are to go with it a mile more; if 
a smooth bore buttonholes us for a block while 
he tells us his opinion of the League of Nations, 
we are to go cheerfully on to martyrdom for 
another block; if — but you could spend many a 
melancholy hour in fulfilling the literal re- 
quirements of this singular text. 

Evidently, the precisely literal interpreta- 
tion will not do. This sentence does not con- 
form to our rules of English grammar, and it 
conforms less to our modern conduct of life. 
What does it mean? To answer that question 
will take you back into an ancient past. 

Cyrus the Great was responsible for these 
words. He did not know it, but he thrust his 
hand far down the five hundred years that were 
to stretch between himself and Jesus, and he it 
was who unknowingly put these words upon the 
Galilean's lips, for Cyrus developed a postal 
system, and made his Persian post carriers 
very important people. There were no rail- 
roads, nor telegraphs, nor telephones; but there 
were good roads, and his Persian carriers with 
their dispatches, of importance to the imperial 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 253 

business or the imperial arms, ran, rode fast 
horses, drove careening carriages, urged swift 
camels, got to where they were going in the 
quickest way they could; and in order that no 
accidents or obstacles or obstinacy should im- 
pede the delivery of their mail, they were em- 
powered by the empire to seize any man, 
animal, wagon, anyone and anything, and 
press it immediately into the service to expedite 
what we would call the national post. 

Came Rome, at last, and swept over the 
Persian empire, and from there, as from else- 
where, Rome adopted whatever good she found 
in other people's organized government, religion, 
and life; and so the practice of impressment, 
concerning which far down the centuries the 
young American republic and England were 
to have some controversy, the custom of com- 
pelling anyone into the service of the empire, 
became part of the Roman system. So it was 
that as Saint Mark tells the tale, the Roman 
soldiers on the way to the crucifixion of Jesus, 
"compel one passing by, Simon of Cyrene, 
coming from the country, . . . that he might 
bear his cross." 

It was this old Persian-Roman custom of im- 
pressment that Jesus had in mind when he 
spoke these words of the text; and whatever 
may be your individual views of pacificism and 



254 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

nonresistance, and however you may have 
thought the New Testament supported you, 
that was not in the thought of Jesus at this 
time. This isn't as mollycoddle as it looks. 
This is bigger business than nonresistance; for 
frankly, nonresistance is about the easiest thing 
in the world. It was much easier to go to 
prison in America than to go to the firing line 
in France. It is much easier to take a blow 
than to run the risk of humiliating defeat by 
fighting. It is much easier to let your wife be 
insulted than to defend her against a group of 
ruffians. I have some patience with pacifists, 
but none with their protestations that their 
moral courage is the greater because it is harder 
to be peaceful than to fight. Nonresistance 
is easy because it means doing nothing, a purely 
negative affair. Going the second mile is hard, 
because it is thoroughly positive. You can't 
fall over it, or droop along it, or slip easily 
across the distance; you have to go; and you 
have to do your own going. Getting beneath 
the literal meaning of the words and into the 
spirit of them, it is nothing less than the super- 
lative expression of life. It is the doctrine of 
doing more than one's duty. "That for which 
the second mile stands is the overplus of good- 
ness, unselfishness, and service." It is religion 
and — ! It is the doctrine carried over into 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 255 

religion and the moral life, which we have 
diligently preached to our children for their 
business policy, that the man who watches the 
clock never improves the time, unless he is a 
clockmaker; that the man who does only what 
he is paid to do is never paid for more than he 
does. Modern industry has done its best to 
destroy that doctrine with its eight hours' pay 
and six hours' work and time-and-a-half for 
overtime, and there are men and women in the 
world who would apply a labor- union scale to 
religious activities and demand extra blessings 
from the Almighty if by any circumstance they 
were to inconvenience themselves in doing a 
chance good or sacrificing an accidental dollar. 
Louis XIV of France was that kind of man. He 
called himself a Christian, and when his troubles 
broke about him cried out, "After all that I have 
done for God!" 

But the New Testament is the worst book 
in the world for that sort of mind. The New 
Testament is a road map of the second mile. 
There were those who said we are to resist 
evil; the New Testament says we are to over- 
come evil with good. There were those who 
said "Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate 
thine enemy"; the New Testament says, "Love 
your enemies and pray for them that despite- 
fully use you." The best thought of the world's 



256 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

noblest minds has always been that a man 
should speak of himself rather modestly; the 
New Testament says that each of us is to count 
"the other better than himself." Almost every 
philosophy and religion has urged that we are 
to love one another; the New Testament says 
that we are to lay down our lives for the 
brethren. Jesus took this figure of the Persian 
post carrier and the Roman officer impressing 
men to speed the business of their empires, 
and set it in the highway of the religious life. 
"Whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go 
with him two." The surplus activity is the in- 
evitable duty ! That is one of the things, at least, 
to which this strange metaphor commands us. 

Immediately, then, a host of questions begins 
to rise. Who has a right to compel us, and how 
shall we know when such compulsion is a duty 
/ and when it is not? Are we to be at the mercy 
of every vagrant selfishness or ignorance or 
brutality that would take advantage of our 
Christian spirit? Every once in a while some 
rascal attempts to swindle the church or the 
preacher, and when he is disappointed, wails 
loud and long about hypocritical Christians. 
Does this text justify his complaint? Where 
will we arrive if we give ourselves in this pro- 
miscuous fashion to every arbitrary demand 
made on us? 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 257 

I grant that you have a problem there; but 
there is a reasonable presumption that Jesus 
never intended his words to be taken as a 
substitute for common sense. As John wrote, 
"he . . . needed not that any should testify of 
man, for he knew what was in man." I reckon 
that the Lord who referred to Herod as "that 
fox" and called the Pharisees hypocrites to 
their faces, can still tell a panhandler in charity 
and morals about as well as we can; and while 
God doubtless credits our hearts when we are 
taken in by a faker, doubtless also he has his 
divine opinion about our heads. There is this 
problem of discriminating between the demands 
when we should go the second mile and those 
to which we should respond, "This is my busy 
day." It is a problem to furnish a good deal 
of interest and no little trouble if one will 
permit it; but I do not intend to permit it 
at this time. Let us be interested now, not 
simply in doing more than our duty, but in 
doing whatever is to be done. Let us forget 
duty and think of opportunity. Let us throw 
away the thought of what we must, and think 
of what we may. "Whosoever shall compel 
thee — ." I do not know who that may be, but 
what if it should be Christ himself? If Christ 
compelled you to go a mile, what about two? 
For if ever anyone has a right to our second 



258 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

mile, that one is Christ. He went the second 
mile for us. Humanly speaking, with the very 
most that our judgment and desire, our intelli- 
gence and feeling could consciously ask, Christ's 
life would have been all we could have expected; 
he gave us his death besides. His life and 
words and works, his gentleness and justice, 
his tenderness and strength — they were the 
mile we might have asked him to walk; he 
went the second mile to sacrifice. We might 
have expected Bethlehem and Nazareth; he 
went to Calvary. "Because Christ also suf- 
fered for you, leaving you an example, that ye 
should follow his steps." 

I 

What if it should be Christ who compels us 
to go a mile? But that is no question at all; 
that is already a fact. Christ stands here to-day 
making his quiet but insistent demands on 
personal life. I do not argue that statement 
at all. If there is any reader of this page who 
denies that life to-day — not only the vast fabric 
of organized aspirations and tendencies and 
activities which we call society, but the per- 
sonal experiences and ideals and conduct of 
the individual as well — is measured by its 
response to the demands of Christ, as the su- 
preme influence in the world, then for such a 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 259 

one I have no message except a declaration. 
In spite of wars and tumults, in spite of the 
passion that takes the place of democracy, the 
fraudulence we have named diplomacy; in spite 
of the materialism of industry and the paganism 
of wealth; in spite of the moral paralysis in 
much of our modern pleasures; in spite of the 
inadequacy and recreancy of the churches 
which have but poorly represented him, Christ 
is as ever and as never before, the light that 
lighteth every man, and Christ is overcoming 
the world. As I have said repeatedly, it is 
against the serene white standards of the 
spirit and teaching of Christ that we are 
judging the operations of our social order, and 
demanding of capital and labor, not that the 
one should domineer and batten and the other 
cringe and obey as in elder times, but that each 
should do unto the other as it would be done 
by. It is by their apprehension of the spirit 
of Christ, whether they acknowledge that spirit 
or not, by the ideal and eagerness for righteous- 
ness which he has wakened, that teachers and 
novelists and social rebels as we have called them, 
have seared society and the church itself with 
their flaming criticisms of modern insincerities 
and shams. It is the spirit of Christ and the 
vast sense of brotherhood which he has evoked 
which is bringing in the new day in prison 



260 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

reform and preventive philanthropy, and that 
real and fundamental democracy so much 
deeper, if more restrained, than the passions 
that usurp its name. "The prince of this world 
has been judged." Christ has judged him and 
the judgment is being inexorably recorded 
day by day. 

And here, before every man and woman of 
us, Christ stands with his demands upon our 
own lives. He is compelling us to go our one 
mile; and we have not appreciated the con- 
straint. We have too much softened his appeal 
and talked about the easiness of the Christian 
life; and the kind of lives some of us live are 
mighty easy, but they are not mightily Chris- 
tian. There can be no justification of an easy 
philosophy of Christian life. Our conception 
of Christianity may be a soft and easily 
adopted habit; but Christ's conception was 
nothing of the kind. "He that loveth father 
or mother more than me is not worthy of 
me" — consider that frankly for a moment — 
"and he that loveth son or daughter more than 
me is not worthy of me." Some time ago a 
young man came to me with a sad and sordid 
story of domestic trouble and separation; and 
what seemed to crush him completely he put 
into a single sobbing sentence, "They won't 
let me see my baby girl." "How old is she?" I 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 261 

asked; and he answered, "She's five, and I 
feel as if I just had to see her." Will you think 
of your son or your daughter, and appraise 
in some vast tide of feeling the fullness of your 
affection for them, and try to think of a greater 
love than that? Then you will not imagine 
Christianity an easy business. And there is 
that sadder story, recurrent in our cities, ap- 
pearing not long ago in our newspapers, of a 
woman, drifting from poverty into easy morals, 
and before the terrible alternative of crime 
or exposure, abandoning her baby in a tunnel; 
and then that tragic tribute to the holiest in 
womanhood, throwing away her name and her 
honor and daring the contempt and publicity 
of it all, to claim the nameless baby her heart 
could not forget. It is a passion superior to 
that which Christ claims and for which he 
makes demand. "If any man will come after 
me, let him deny himself, and take up his 
cross, and follow me." When you look honestly 
at the task of self-denial and do not cheapen 
it into any of the mild inconveniences we have 
come complacently to call our crosses, you will 
not find Christ's Christianity any easy business. 
This Christ is going a mile farther than I have 
gone; and till I go the second mile I have not 
traveled the life he would have me go. 



262 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

II 

Apply this principle, for instance, to the 
matter of our belief. That is the point at which 
we are most likely to have great confidence. 
I have asked a score of men and women who 
were looking sheerly into the face of eternity 
as to their belief, and only once have I had a 
hesitating reply. yes, they have always 
believed the Bible and in God and in Christ; 
and the like. Few things are more perplexing 
than the assurance with which men and women 
whose lives have been quite indifferent to every 
religious institution and experience will assert 
on their death beds their certain belief. But 
what they mean by belief is vastly different 
from what Christ and the New Testament 
mean by it. They have believed that somehow 
the Book is a good Book, and must be true, 
though they have no knowledge of it other 
than that. They have believed that somewhere 
there is a colossal being called God. They have 
believed that once upon a time a mysterious 
and magic Christ was somewhere on the earth. 
And this almost travesty of belief, remote and 
impersonal and quite vague, is oftentimes re- 
flected in the minds of men and women who 
would greatly resent a depreciation of their 
own Christian character. I heard a man, asked 
if he were a Christian, reply almost angrily, 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 263 

"Do you think I'm a heathen?" But the fact 
in the case was that, so far as any effective 
personal faith is concerned, he was not the one 
to be offended; it was the heathen that had 
cause for complaint. There are men and women 
who, so far as they know, answer the questions 
as regards church membership, who read their 
Bibles once in a while, and who keep the con- 
ventions of Christian society, and who in any 
census which may be taken are to be counted 
as believers. But if their belief were analyzed, 
it would be like this: they believe the Bible 
in what it says about heaven, and ignore it 
altogether in its relations to earth; they trust 
God for what he is reported to have done in 
the past and for other people, but they carry 
on their own lives in the present with no regard 
for him at all; they accept anything which 
may be said as to Christ being their Saviour 
from sin, but they never think of admitting 
him as Lord over their lives. 

In other words, if you go to the heart of the 
matter, they have traveled one mile with 
Christ; the other mile is still untrod. We may 
be even better than I have indicated. We may 
be as sound as John Wesley on the whole 
system of beliefs which go to make up the body 
of Christian doctrine, from anti-Pelagianism 
to the intermediate state, and be practically 



264 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

as faithless as a Hottentot. A few years ago 
a rather noted thinker said that there are two 
words which sum up the substance of our 
belief — reverence and humility. That is not 
the whole truth, but as far as it goes it has a 
searching challenge in it. You may rely upon 
your belief of the Bible, and your acceptance 
of the standards of your church, and your 
honest acquiescence in the doctrine of God and 
the deity of Christ and the fact of immortality 
and the reality of heaven; but if you are not 
reverent, if you do not think of God a great 
deal, if you do not remember Jesus Christ, if, 
in ways which you may not identify, the Spirit 
does not take of the things of Christ and show 
them to you; if you do not look fairly into the 
face of your shortcomings and appreciate that, 
with all your good moral purpose, you have not 
necessarily won heaven but in comparison with 
what you might be are still unprofitable; if 
you have not recognized the reality of your 
sin and come to depend tremendously upon 
the leadership of God; if you do not live with 
a very real spiritual interest and earnestness, 
your belief does not amount to very much after 
all. For that second mile is not simply belief, 
but faith — and there is a difference. George 
MacDonald, whom we do not read any more — 
he cannot be rewritten for the movies — put 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 265 

the truth in one striking sentence: "Any faith 
in him, however small, is better than any belief 
about him, however great." Belief is accepting 
certain conclusions as true; faith is living on 
those conclusions. It is not the convincing of 
the intellect but the surrender and compulsion 
of the life. These, of course, are very old and 
trite words, but they are still pertinent, for 
most of us are repeating old and trite defec- 
tiveness in religious habits. 

When one speaks of the surrender of life it 
recalls occasions of special consecration, moods 
and tempers here and there along the way of 
our experience, when we felt with perhaps 
unusual intensity, and saw spiritual opportunity 
and truth with unusual clearness, and made 
some special dedication of ourselves. I have 
no quarrel with that; I could wish that we 
might have those moods and tempers and make 
those dedications far oftener. But the belief 
which goes the second mile does not begin with 
ecstasy, and it need not wait for recurrences of 
emotion. "Now, lad," said David Livingstone's 
Sunday-school teacher to the boy whose great- 
ness could not be foreseen, "make religion the 
everyday business of your life, not a thing of 
fits and starts." The belief which goes the 
second mile is not a remembered event; it is a 
continuous adventure. It is not an experience 



266 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

only; it is a habit. It is not a burst of vision 
or a wave of feeling; it is a life. And that 
means that it is not a form nor a performance; 
it is the supreme fact of the soul. There are 
some elements of belief which are inevitable. 
"Thou believest that there is one God; thou 
doest well," writes St. James, and the sarcasm 
in his words is evident: "Thou doest well: 
the devils also believe and tremble." And while 
there is no particular credit coming to a Chris- 
tian for something in which the devils go still 
farther, there is no vital belief in God which 
does not have in it that element of trembling 
fear. But Christian belief which has cast out 
fear has brought in a great deal more — an assur- 
ance of God's leadership and care, a depend- 
ence upon his providence and protection, a spirit 
of sacrifice in the name of Christ, a life which 
radiates the confidence and sympathy and for- 
bearance and joy and hope of the Lord. 

Now, what makes all this living faith seem 
so remote from the lives of so many of us? 
Is it not because we do not live up to our pro- 
fession? We claim great privileges, but do not 
avail ourselves of them. We have a God whom 
we say we can trust utterly, but we do not 
utterly trust him. "The unreality of God," as 
has been finely said, "to many of us nominal 
Christians is due to our failure to appropriate 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 267 

that which we say we think we possess in 
him." 1 

We own lands of the spirit on which we do not 
live, have spiritual claims we have not pre- 
empted, hold spiritual wealth we have not 
invested, name Christ, but do not know him. 
That appropriation of what we possess, that 
living what we say is our faith, is the second 
mile in our belief. 

Ill 
Here is Christ compelling us to go with him 
one mile, and we are to go with him two. 
Apply it to the matter of what we call our 
Christian work. We are rather afraid of such 
a measurement, for all of our practical minds. 
We want to be measured by our own intentions. 
We judge our moral value by what we wish to 
be. We want to be estimated on the basis of 
our tenderest, if transient, feelings. We go 
by our conscience, regardless of what has hap- 
pened to it along the way. Besides which, 
I know of no place where we use words with 
less regard to their real meaning than here at 
the place of what we call our Christian service. 
It goes without saying that there are men and 
women in plenty, in the church and out, who 
are actually and unceasingly busy in effective 

Coffin, University Sermons; Yale Press, 32. 



268 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

activities for society and the kingdom of 
Christ; but there are men and women in plenty 
— how many more, none can say — who speak 
of themselves as active Christians, but whose 
activities are confined to singing "Onward, 
Christian soldiers" in public worship and put- 
tering for an hour or so once in a while with 
some society or circle that does not incon- 
venience them in any noticeable way. From 
time to time what we call a movement is in- 
augurated throughout the church to enlist 
church members in definite evangelism. A 
few years ago it was the Time Legion. Five 
hundred thousand men and women were to 
give two hours a month to specific Christian 
service; more recently it is the movement 
through which the Centenary leaders appealed 
for one million additions to the church. When 
you reckon what half a million men and women 
devoting two hours a month to specific Chris- 
tian activity would mean in inspiration and 
reenforcement to Methodism at large; when 
you realize that while such an enlistment would 
involve half a million for but twenty -four hours 
in a year, it would mean one hundred and 
seventy-one years of a man's continuous ser- 
vice; and if each one of the half a million en- 
listed but one other person in the Christian 
life, it would be a gain of five hundred thousand 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 269 

members a year, such a movement, Time 
Legion or whatever it may be called, looks big. 
But if you will stop to realize that two hours 
a month is one three-hundred-and-sixtieth of 
the time; if you will take into account the 
number of hours Methodist business men dawdle 
in their clubs and luncheons, and Methodist 
women spend in literary and social activities 
outside the church, two hours a month devoted 
to the kingdom do not seem to be quite so 
much, after all. 

I am not bringing any indictment against 
the church or against anyone in it or out of it; 
I am simply trying to point out the inadequacy 
of some of our habitual measurements of Chris- 
tian service. Whether what Christians have 
done has always been worth doing is a question 
which can be easily debated; but whether the 
time in which we live makes demands upon 
the intelligence and thoroughness and constancy 
and sacrifice of Christian people, is one con- 
cerning which there can be no possible argu- 
ment. There is a noble saying of George Adam 
Smith, that with the voice which sets our 
hearts right with God comes the voice to set 
the world right, and no man is godly who has 
not heard both. And the world needs to be 
set right to-day if it ever did. Taking our 
language from the ancient liturgies, we call our 



270 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

public worship a service; but we forget that 
the factor that gave the older worship meaning 
was the sacrifice upon the altar. The peril 
which besets our modern movements in the 
church, and the one to which successively they 
have fallen, is that of disintegration through 
speech. It is so easy, as we frequently 
hear, to substitute elocution for action; and 
men can become so busy even telling what God 
has done for them that they have no time to 
do anything else for God. 

This is not to discount the customary activi- 
ties which make up in general the average total 
of what is called church work, or Christian work. 
Philanthropies and leaderships and movements 
and societies and the like have their place, 
and many, many times it is a gracious place. 
Whether we have recognized it or not, they 
are the product of our belief. They are a 
tribute, however unconsciously it may be, to 
our loyalty to Christ. They are something 
which we do in his name, and to the doing of 
them, through a score of relevant aptitudes 
and tastes and talents, we are constrained by 
him. There is a satisfaction and an enjoy- 
ment in them. And here and there are those 
who feel that even in these secular activities, 
whose purpose and glory are the church, Christ 
is with them. This is the first mile, and we 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 271 

walk it gladly. But we stop at the end of the 
mile. We are quite sure, as we feel the weari- 
ness, and remember the price we have paid, 
that we have done our share. But we forget 
that no one has the right to apportion his own 
task. Christianity is not a democracy; it is 
an absolute monarchy. "One is your Master, 
even Christ." Christ told the parable of the 
laborers in the vineyard to suggest that no 
man's work is to be measured by the time he 
spends or the accomplishment he achieves. 
"When ye have done all, say, We are unprofit- 
able servants." This second mile is the mile 
from compromises to unqualified fidelity, from 
conscription to consecration, from day's work 
to bond service, from tasks to life. "When ye 
have done all, stand." There is to be no halting 
until everything is over; and even then there 
is to be no retreat. We have conceived of 
heaven as a place of eternal rest; and perhaps 
it is. But I read that "they serve him day and 
night." And if there is to be no night there, 
it can only be that the service shall be more 
glorious as it goes on forever. 

You have not done your share of the work of 
the kingdom until you have done all the work 
there is. You have given your tithe? But you 
can never measure how much you ought to 
give by what you have given, but by what you 



272 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

have left. This is Christ's measurement of 
duty. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I 
work." There is nothing said about quitting. 
Shall one give less often than he forgives, or do 
less than the Lord has claimed from him? And 
the one is seventy times seven, and the other 
is "He that loseth his life" — not "lendeth it for 
a little time" — "shall find it unto life eternal." 

One of the earlier stories which came to us 
from the first years of the Great War was of 
an English surgeon, wounded unto the death, 
on one of those trodden battlefields, and lying 
on the trampled ground to die in what peace 
he could. But he heard the moan of the 
wounded men around him, and edging himself 
along from man to man, with incredible labor 
and pain, with his hypodermic needle he gave 
the anaesthetic where it would bring relief, 
until, faltering, he fell dead beside another 
man whom he was helping, and when they 
found him the needle was still held in the 
majestic tenderness of his dying grasp. That 
is the second mile of service. It is service which 
does not end with the letter of the law. It is 
not finished when your convenience is passed 
or your patience is exhausted. It continues 
as long as there is anything to be done; and if 
it dies, it dies with its hand upon whatever 
opportunity it can reach. 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 273 

IV 

And, now, I am afraid I shall touch the 
tragedy of a great deal of our religious experi- 
ence when I ask you to apply this principle of 
the second mile to the matter of your Christian 
joy. With all of the new and gracious spirit 
of practical friendliness and helpfulness which 
the religion of our day is manifesting in a 
hundred activities of social usefulness, one of 
the most apparent differences between it and 
the religion of a generation or two ago is its 
lack of joyousness. I do not mean that Chris- 
tians are more sad-looking or soberly acting 
than they used to be; far from it. They laugh 
more, and amuse themselves far more, and 
take life a great deal more easily and frivolously 
than ever their fathers did. But I am quite 
sure that they do not enjoy what religion they 
have as their fathers enjoyed the religion they 
had. We have much more pleasure; they had 
much more joy. We are vastly more amused, 
they were vastly more glad. We are consid- 
erably more entertained; they were consid- 
erably more blessed. And while some of us 
have never made a very fine distinction, per- 
haps, yet there are whole continents of differ- 
ence between the meanings of those words. 
That heroic company of the early Christian 
Church had scant pleasure. They had perse- 



274 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

cution and pain and poverty and flight. They 
were never amused; they furnished the terrible 
amusement of many a Roman holiday as the 
mobs looked fiercely on their martyrdoms. They 
knew little of what we call entertainment. They 
had their poor homes burned and their bodies 
mangled and their altars desecrated, and saw 
those they loved writhing in the agonies of 
lingering death and shame. But there isn't 
any other history or literature so radiant, so 
redolent, so melodious with profound and un- 
conquerable joy as the literature and history 
of the apostolic church, "pressed on every side, 
yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto 
despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten 
down, yet not destroyed; always bearing about 
in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life 
also of Jesus may be manifested in our body." 
And that note of deep and ineradicable joy 
has been present in all rich and effective 
Christian experience since then. Here it is 
Martin Luther with his great German songs, 
his outbursts of noisy happiness and his un- 
shakable gladness in Christ. Here it is John 
Bunyan wanting to talk to the very crows that 
sat upon the plowed lands, of the mercy cf 
God to him. Here it is John Wesley testifying 
how he was changed from a convict spiritually, 
seeking to shorten his sentence by good be- 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 275 

havior, into a free man rejoicing in Christ, and 
here it is Billy Bray, the English local preacher- 
evangelist, who as he walked, heard one of his 
feet say "Glory!" and the other answer "Amen!" 

It is unhappily very true that we have not 
commonly felt that supreme rejoicing. There 
is no doubt of our loyalty, no doubt of our 
aspirations, no doubt of the sincerity and 
desire with which we have given ourselves to 
the Christian life; but that exuberance of spirit, 
that buoyancy of the soul, has not yet come to 
us. We get pleasure from the public worship, 
and the fellowships of the religious life are very 
dear to us, and the stately and tender promises 
of the Bible cheer us, and we gather satis- 
faction from our relationship to the church 
and our profession of religion, and we pray 
our prayers and sleep at night with conventional 
peace as we think of God — but that character- 
istic and indomitable joy of it we have not 
gotten. 

Here is how we may get it. The mile of con- 
ventional belief and average conduct has 
brought us to the usual tame and colorless 
satisfaction. The second mile, of adventurous 
faith and unqualified service, will bring us to 
the indomitable joy. Christ has compelled us 
to go one mile with him; let us go with him 
two. 



276 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

V 

And what kind of a mile is this second mile, 
and what kind of joy is it that we shall find 
upon it? It is the mile from the monotony 
of routine commonplace profession to the joy 
of a perfect obedience. "My meat," said Jesus, 
"my very life, is to do the will of him that 
sent me." And not even the shadow of the im- 
pending cross could prevent the gladness of 
the hour when he cried, "I have finished the 
work which thou gavest me to do." There is 
the second mile. We have not that exuberance 
of life because we have not that completeness 
of obedience. There are no pages in literature 
more vocal with rejoicing than those written 
by Saint Paul, a man who suffered impoverish- 
ment, and imprisonment, and humiliation, and 
persecution, and repulsive illness, and the mis- 
understanding and jealousy of those who should 
have been his reenf or cement. If you want the 
secret of it, you will find it in those simple 
words: "I was not disobedient unto the heavenly 
vision." He found that heavenly visions involve 
very earthly processes, but he was still obedient. 
That is the highway of the second mile. 

It is a truth brought home to us in a very 
humble illustration. I was in a home some 
time since where the mother of the family 
asked the growing boy, "Have you done all 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 277 

that father told you to do?" And the boy 
answered, "I sure have, and I can hardly wait 
for him to get home to see it." It had meant 
a whole day's hard, grubbing work, the kind 
that not even Tom Sawyer could have gotten 
anyone to do for him. There had been other 
things the boy wanted to do, and other places 
to which he wanted to go; but there was the 
work, and he was alone, and while he disliked 
the whole business, he did the work. Other 
boys had gone by and called to him, and as 
the hours passed his chance for the day's 
pleasure went with them; but he had stayed 
at the job, and now he was anxious for his 
father to come. And his father came while 
I was there; and he had not hung his hat on 
the rack until the boy had said, "I got that 
job done all right, all right; it took me all day, 
but she's done." It was not grammatical, but 
it was emphatic; and the father did not care 
for the grammar, but the look on his face 
would have told you without a word, that 
there wasn't another boy like that in all the 
city; and the boy's face was a shining witness 
to the fact that no one in the city felt as good 
as he felt. He had done the work, he had filled 
his commission, he had kept the faith, he had 
traveled his highway of duty. He had the 
joy of obedience. I take that bit of homely 



278 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

daily life, and lift it up toward these high 
places, and show you Luther and Bunyan and 
Wesley and Paul and the great company of 
the unknown and unnamed and unremembered 
whose gladness neither pain nor loss nor sorrow 
nor misunderstanding nor disillusionment nor 
anything else could stifle. This is the way they 
went. Dante wrote, "In his will is our peace." 
He could have written that in his will is our 
joy. "These things have I spoken unto you," 
said Jesus himself, "that my joy might be in 
you, and that your joy may be made full." 
What things had he spoken? Well, here is 
one of them, "If ye keep my commandments 
. . . even as I have kept my Father's command- 
ments." And will you remember that it was 
he "who, for the joy that was set before him, 
endured the cross"? 

Then, too, this second mile is the mile from 
the feeling of safety to the joy of victory. The 
feeling of safety is good so far as it goes. 
"What time I am afraid, I will trust in the 
Lord." "I will trust in the Lord, whom then 
shall I fear?" But it does not go far enough. 
I heard a preacher once declaring to his patient 
but not wholly enthusiastic congregation that 
religion was, after all, only a certain insurance 
against eternity; but what a poor sort of thing 
religion would be if that were all! That isn't 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 279 

Jesus's idea of it. "The water that I shall give 
shall become a well of water springing up unto 
eternal life." That was Jesus's thought of it. 
Not fire-proofing, but fresh empowering. It 
isn't insurance; it is experience. It is not a 
sense of relief that you are behind heavy bul- 
warks and out of reach of the enemy; it is the 
feeling that in the thick of the firing you can 
keep your flag up. You may be hit, but you 
can't be taken prisoner; you may be struck 
down, but you can't be put out of the conflict. 
It isn't protection here or there; it is life for- 
evermore. Dr. Horton has somewhere written 
that "It is not the joy of being spared the 
trials and temptations which beset us as men, 
but the joy of victory over them." And he 
ought to know. When he wrote those very 
words he was in the heart of his most terrible 
experiences. His wife had but recently died. 
He had just returned from Germany, where he 
had been sent to save his eyesight. Two of 
his friends living with him had lost their only 
surviving relatives in one day. There was mis- 
understanding in his church, and members were 
resigning in a way that hurt him to the quick. 
His friends criticized him for nursing a sorrow 
he ought to have overcome, and others suggested 
that if he couldn't be more cheerful he wouldn't 
be of much service as a pastor any more. And 



280 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

then he was asked to write a chapter on the 
joy of the victorious life. What would you 
have done in the circumstances? Some of us 
could not write a chapter on the joy of the vic- 
torious life in any circumstances. I hope no 
one asks me what I would have done. But 
Dr. Horton replied: "I can write about it. I 
can say with a solemn wonder that 'His grace 
is sufficient for me,' . . . and his voice saying 
'Peace, be still* gives me the sense of victory." 
That is the joy of the second mile, compared to 
which our easy sense of being safe, our tame 
satisfaction that we are Christians, is but a 
poor and broken thing. "Who shall separate 
us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, 
or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or naked- 
ness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in all these 
things we are more than conquerors." There is 
the second mile made luminous and vocal, the 
joy of personal victory. 

And then, finally, it is the mile from wistful 
desire to certain hope and confidence. This is 
the mile that ends in immortality. I was 
speaking some time ago to a gracious Christian 
gentleman and the conversation turned in a 
sudden train of thought to the subject of 
heaven. There was no mistaking the wistful- 
ness in his voice as he said, "I certainly want 
to go there." 



THE CHRISTIAN OVERPLUS 281 

I have just used the word "hope." Do not 
mistake its meaning. There is no uncertainty 
in it. Hope is made up of desire and expecta- 
tion; it is the most certain thing in the world. 
In one of the better of our contemporary novels, 
some time ago, I came across a remark that 
all our belief and religion and our hope of im- 
mortality come to no more in the end than the 
wish to be remembered a little kindly when the 
grass is green over us! Now, you would think 
even a novelist would know more than that. 
I know more than that myself! "I know that 
my Redeemer liveth!" And yet, with it all, 
do we not sometimes look into that dim future 
when our pitchers shall be broken at the foun- 
tain, not only with awe and curiosity and wist- 
fulness, but with something of fear, as well? 
God never intended it that way. We are not 
living up to our privileges of peace. 

Perhaps there is no more beautiful statement 
of our wistfulness than Longfellow's translation: 

"The mildest herald by our fate allotted 
Beckons, and with inverted torch doth stand 
To lead us with a gentle hand 



Into the Silent Land." 

But you have to modify even so gracious and 
tender a phraseology as that. It is no fate that 
does our allotting; it is a great and good God. 



282 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

You can never demonstrate immortality or 
heaven from any of the premises the usual 
arguments of orthodoxy have taken, or by any 
of the analogies or logic they have employed. 
It is the inevitable complement to and inex- 
orable inference from the character of God; 
and we can be sure of that. So we travel from 
desire to hope, from wistfulness to confidence. 
We go one mile perhaps to the silence and the 
dark, but the next takes us to the city where 
the glory of God doth lighten it and the lamp 
thereof is the Lamb; and we may know, be- 
cause God is what he is, that "the ransomed of 
the Lord shall return, and come with singing 
unto Zion; and everlasting joy shall be upon 
their heads : they shall obtain gladness and joy, 
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." It is 
the music of the second mile. 



X 

THE IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 



And [ye] are built upon the foundation of 
the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself 
being the chief corner stone. — Ephesians 2. 20 



. THE IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 

There are some scriptures you can see 
through at the first look, but this is not one 
of them; you have to look at this one several 
times. What is meant by "the foundation of 
the apostles and prophets''? Is it something 
they were or something they had? Neither; it 
is something they laid. The phrase refers 
neither to their character nor their possessions, 
but to their work. It was something they did. 
We know who the apostles were, and the 
prophets spoken of were of about the same 
order. "He gave some to be apostles, and some 
prophets!" They were those impassioned first- 
century preachers of whom Paul said, "He that 
prophesieth edifieth" — that is, buildeth up — 
"the church." And whatever it was that they 
made, this additional phrase, "Jesus Christ 
himself being the chief corner stone," indicates 
that it is not identical with him. He is the 
corner stone, but the foundation is something 
else. He is in it, the consummation of it, but 
it is not simply he. Then here is the word 
"ye"; what does it mean? The next sentence 
reads that "all the building fitly framed to- 
gether, groweth unto an holy temple in the 
285 



286 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Lord"; and that is obviously some social organ- 
ization and can mean only the church. One 
verse more adds that, in distinction from this 
organization as a whole, "y e also are builded 
together." There is the word "y e " reappearing 
and we cannot escape the inference that it 
refers to the body of individuals constituting 
the social organization of the church. So that 
the text is a declaration and doctrine that the 
church as an institution and the personal life 
and experience and relationships of the indi- 
vidual members, are built upon the foundation 
which the apostles and prophets laid; in which 
the unique fact and unifying support is Jesus 
Christ himself. And, further, if the words 
have any meaning at all, we are not only built 
on this foundation, but from it; and because of 
it, are growing up into some stupendous and 
divine estate. 

All of this has a very dignified and solemn 
sound; one could almost suspect that Saint 
Paul was interested in theology. But in spite 
of the forbidding sound it may be profitable 
for us to go on to see what he is thinking about. 
What is the foundation? We shall discover 
that when we learn what is being built. We 
shall understand our beginning when we dis- 
tinguish our end. We shall recognize the road 
when we realize the terminus. When we are 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 287 

certain of the church's objective, and the issue 
of personal experience, we will be sure of what 
the foundation is. And this chapter does not 
leave us long in doubt. The object of the 
church is to become a holy temple in the Lord. 
It is to hallow humanity into the dwelling place 
of God. John saw a new earth, and the holy 
city coming down out of heaven; and we need 
not quarrel with his vision. But we shall get 
the new earth by renewing the old one: "Be- 
hold, I make all things new." And the holy 
city will come down out of heaven only when 
we have lifted the unholy city up to heaven. 
Then, of course, the tabernacle of God will be 
with men, and he shall dwell with them, and 
they shall be his peoples and God himself shall 
be their God. It may be yonder, but it must 
become here; and that is the very business of 
the church; to grow into a holy temple in the 
Lord. 

That does not sound like a modern efficiency 
utterance. I haven't seen that in any social 
program of the church. But it is here. I do 
not read here that the purpose of the church 
is to open forums for the free discussion of 
wages, sanitation, strikes, Bolshevism, or the 
short ballot. I do not find here that the 
church is to take charge of everything from the 
pure-food laws to Presidential campaigns. The 



288 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

church ought to be mightily concerned and 
influential in all of these aspects of society, 
for nothing that concerns humanity dare be 
foreign to it; but its chief business is far beyond 
these things. There are multitudes of earnest 
people insisting that these social activities are 
the supreme business of the church, but they 
are nothing of the kind. These social activities 
are means, not ends; tributaries that flow into 
the main stream, but not the mighty current 
itself. The supreme business of the church is 
to make humanity a temple of God; and while 
securing minimum wage laws, and remodeling 
tenements, and reforming politics, and leaven- 
ing industry, and admonishing wealth, and clos- 
ing the chasm we call class consciousness, are 
doubtless part of the church's gigantic task, 
they are, nevertheless, only part, while on 
beyond them extends its vast and solemn 
enterprise. The only reason the church has 
for adventuring on this subordinate social ac- 
tivity is because otherwise the right kind of 
people will not do it. That contradicts, of 
course, a good deal of the catch-as-catch-can 
thinking of the present hour; but when you 
really think about it, it doesn't take a divine 
institution to reform the world. You do not 
need a supernatural insight or order to tear 
down slums, and abolish child labor, and legis- 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 289 

late concerning dangerous occupations, and 
insist on cooperation in industry, and prevent 
social diseases. Common sense will do all that 
if you give it a chance. But it takes the very 
spirit of God to make men into a temple. When 
you shall have your industry and capital at 
perfect harmony and partnership, when indus- 
trial injustice is but a memory and political 
corruption a fading dream— if that shall be all, 
then your world will still be a hell of repressed 
desires, of enmities and hates and lusts and 
skepticisms and despairs. Making a social 
order is one thing, but making a temple of 
God is quite another. The one is a matter of 
law; the other is a matter of life. The one 
can be produced by legislatures and assemblies 
and Soviets; the other can arise only through 
vision and the passion of prayer and the glory 
of sacrifice and the splendor of empowered 
souls. The foundation of a social order need 
be no more than economic prudence, common 
sense crystallized in ordinances and enforced by 
the police; the other — why, humanity a temple 
of God must be a living something, strong 
enough to stand the multitudinous tramp of 
centuries of curious and expanding knowledge 
and the endless beat of the eternal years of 
God. It must be something as broad as eternity 
and deeper than the passions of men; and so 



290 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

quick and constant and compelling that their 
sins and shames and hates and the very gates 
of hell cannot prevail against it. It must have 
in it the very life of God to give life through 
all the reaches of unmeasured time and place. 
That is what the apostles and prophets fore- 
casted for us and laid for us, out of which and 
on which the historic church is standing, and 
on which alone the church of to-day and the 
stormy to-morrows must stand, and upon which 
we ourselves must grow into this amazing 
temple of God. And so this is a great question: 
What is this foundation which they laid? And 
it is a great answer that you get: It was their 
preaching of Christ, the gospel as they pro- 
claimed and shaped it. We ultra-modern people, 
with all our impatience with the past, with all 
our revolutions of thought and feeling, with all 
our adventures into novelty, are built upon a 
historic and sublime tradition. 

Now, when I say tradition I speak in almost 
a foreign tongue. The mythical man on the 
street, of whom we hear much and see nothing, 
is not saying anything like that. And I know 
quite a few preachers and hosts of social en- 
thusiasts who are not saying anything like that. 
They are saying, "Away with tradition!" They 
are saying that we do not want tradition, we 
want something practical. They are saying 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 291 

that the day of creeds is passed. They are 
saying that it doesn't matter what one believes, 
that what matters is what one does. Religion 
has been taken away from the altar and out 
of the heart and put into all sorts of harness 
and hobbies. It doesn't matter what you 
believe! And the results are seen in the crum- 
bling moralities, the discarded restraints, the 
vulgar manners, the miscellaneous absurdities 
of cult and inconsistency which dupe the wistful 
souls of unsettled, shallow men and women 
all round us. 

The truth is far different. We are built upon 
a tradition. If it does not matter what you 
believe, but only what you do, nevertheless 
what you do depends terribly upon what you 
believe. At the bottom of every life lies its 
creed, inevitable even if unrealized. Destruc- 
tionists, from one point of view, claim to be 
unbelievers, as, for instance, the wild leaders 
of the Russian agony. Constructionists are 
men of mighty faith; as witness the Pilgrims 
and Cromwell and the pioneers whose graves 
are the footprints of the nation. But though 
revolutionists like Trotsky and Lenin and their 
rabid disciples even in America may claim to 
be unbelievers, how fiercely they believe the 
creed that fires their savagery! The world's 
servants and its assassins have alike been great 



292 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

believers; the difference is in what they have 
believed. It is the world's bigots who have 
built. Some people, of course, are tolerant, 
because they have nothing to be intolerant 
about; but a faith for which a man will die is 
not something he can bury under oozy senti- 
mentalities for the sake of being called liberal. 
We are built upon a historic and sublime tra- 
dition, the preaching of the apostles and 
prophets. 

This is the foundation on which we are built. 
It was what the apostles preached. It was what 
they preached because it was first what they 
believed. They believed and therefore, also, 
they spoke. What, then, did they believe, and 
what did they speak? What did the apostles 
and prophets preach? "We preach Christ," 
That is Paul's answer. That is the sublime 
tradition on which we stand and must live and 
grow to-day: Christ as preached by those who 
were there at the divine tradition's birth. 

I 

So, then, we come face to face with the su- 
preme question of the New Testament, and 
not that alone, but the supreme question for 
the day in which we are living. Who was 
Christ, as the apostles and prophets preached 
him, and what was the message which they 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 293 

brought? That question lies at the heart of 
all our modern inquiry and unbelief; it is the 
question of the person and nature of Christ. 
Many people to-day have not recognized or 
remembered the importance of this question; 
but all our criticism and misunderstanding of 
the church, the accusations against it and our 
fears for it, run back to root themselves in 
the nature of Christ. AH our hopes and pro- 
grams of Christianizing the world, of remaking 
society in terms of justice, brotherhood, spiritual 
democracy, and the like, depend on the nature 
of Christ. What did the earliest and determin- 
ative preachers proclaim that he was? 

First of all, they declared that he was the 
incarnation of God. "When the fullness of the 
time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a 
woman — " I do not begin to understand it; 
I shall not attempt to explain it. But here it 
is written large across the pages of the New 
Testament, unmistakable upon the lips of Jesus 
himself, and stamped in the very texture of 
the new social and religious life which gathered 
about him and those who followed him. Jesus 
was not only a man, with all the elements of 
humanity, but he was in a unique and inex- 
plicable fashion of the very nature of God as 
well. "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father." "I and the Father are one." I am 



294 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

well aware that this is very trite; it is the intel- 
lectual stock-in-trade of the orthodox pulpit. 
But nowadays nevertheless we have gotten 
practically a long distance from that unhesi- 
tating emphasis on the deity of Christ. 

The comparative study of religions, as car- 
ried on by the gifted and reverent scholarship, 
has revealed the strata of common ideals and 
aspirations and beliefs running through many 
races and expressed in many theologies, a great 
body of common sentiment and symbolism 
behind the variant religious systems; and little 
by little the common mind has felt the subtle 
influence of such investigations, and has been 
bringing the great prophetic figures into prox- 
imity, naming them in one great company of 
the immortals — Buddha and the Baha and 
Moses and Mohammed and Jesus; and in the 
light of a few ethical similarities men have 
almost lost sight of the unfathomable distinc- 
tions between Christ and the others. That is 
the result of a modern intellectual activity. 

In the social sphere our generation has been 
swept with an ever-broadening passion for 
brotherhood, which the fatality of the war 
seemed to shatter but seems now but to have 
emphasized. Democracy has been interpreted, 
not only in terms of politics, economics, and 
industry, but in terms of religion also; and the 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 295 

church is being appraised and indicted by reason 
of its social and industrial conditions of which 
humanly Jesus could have had no knowledge. 
His figure is outlined for us as that of an eco- 
nomic enthusiast; a Syrian prophet of the pro- 
letarian movement; a Galilsean Debs; or else 
in the mind of the violent is proclaimed as a 
myth devised by the few to keep the many in 
economic slavery. 

In one other modern mood, neither intellec- 
tual nor social, our generation is that of a 
hysterical and imitation culture. Increasing 
numbers of our superficial folks, chiefly leis- 
urely ladies of both sexes, indulge themselves 
variously in curious and changing novelties of 
faith or new thought, the chief constituents of 
which are guess work and ignorance. So that 
we meet constantly such phrases as "the simple 
peasant of Nazareth," "the childlike beliefs of 
the naive Jesus." I discovered, in a widely 
advertised book on America, written not long 
ago by a Londoner apparently well known, the 
interesting statement that Jesus was the incar- 
nation of the Moral Ideal of Manhood; that 
the Spirit of Beneficent Service of Mankind 
was Incarnate in him. One may question what 
such language means, but there are multitudes 
of shabby-genteel minds that read it as if it 
were a new apocalypse, and who tell us we 



296 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

are to live as Jesus lived, carefree children of 
a universe in which everything is lovely. 

Such are some of the positions in respect of 
Christ which our day has taken and which we 
have to keep in mind. But a closer view than 
these positions indicate will make it plain that 
this comparative study of religion shows anew 
the incomparable tragedy of sin, and the failure 
of the noblest ethnic faiths to touch that 
tragedy with healing. The social enthusiasm, 
in spite of itself, bears witness that, deeper 
than the social maladjustments, injustices and 
disadvantages which must be reformed, is the 
same biting fact of personal sin beyond the 
reach of social adjustment; and while these 
comfortable and well-fed people are patronizing 
Christ and murmuring in placid fashion that 
everything is lovely, the world's suffering and 
sorrow, the sting of wrong and stain of lust and 
tragedies of hearts that break, are beating over 
it in a vast, immeasurable storm of contra- 
dicting fact. 

When one looks at these latter-day substitutes 
for historic Christianity it is no wonder men 
say that the church is failing, that the church 
is doomed. The church that builds on such 
shifting foundations is doomed. The moral 
task is too big for us if all we have is a Galilsean 
peasant. The world will never be greatly 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 297 

helped if our strength comes only from an 
incarnation of the spirit of beneficent service. 
But we need recall that we have immensely 
more than either or than both; we have the 
Son of God, born of a woman. We are built 
on the incarnation of God. These folks say 
the church is trembling, when only society's 
insecure presumptions are shaking in the wind. 
We are built upon a deeper foundation. Be- 
neath us is the steadfast gospel of a super- 
natural Christ for a supernatural task. 

And that isn't the whole gospel; that isn't 
all that the apostles and prophets preached. 
There is not only a supernatural work but 
there has been already a supernatural accom- 
plishment. Christ is not only the incarnation 
of God; he is the incarnation of God for a 
particular purpose — the salvation of the world. 
"God sent forth his Son, born of a woman . . . 
that he might redeem." "I delivered unto you 
first of all, that which I received" — here is 
Paul's statement of his preaching — "that Christ 
died for our sins according to the Scriptures." 
The Christ they preached is considerably more 
than a Moral Ideal of Manhood. "God was in 
Christ reconciling the world unto himself." 

It is unnecessary to remark on the modern 
repugnance to theories of the atonement, though 
the sacrifices of life in the present war have 



298 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

made us more sympathetic with the idea of 
vicarious suffering and vicarious death. Neither 
need one call attention to the insoluble mystery 
of the divine method. But the mystery of the 
method need not discount the mightiness of 
the fact; and the one supreme and uncompro- 
mising note which sounds through the entire 
New Testament, from the soberest words of 
Jesus to the triumphant pageantry of Revela- 
tion, is that Jesus died for sin. "Neither is there 
any other name under heaven, that is given 
among men, wherein we must be saved." We 
may acknowledge the mystery in it, but we 
cannot elude the force of it. It has made our 
Christian life and is the sustaining factor in our 
Christian literature. I was preaching one 
afternoon at one of our State universities and 
had spoken on the "Preeminence of Christ." 
As we came out of the university chapel, a 
lady was pointed out to me as having left the 
Methodist Church to unite with the Unitarians. 
When I asked the perfectly foolish question 
why, I was informed that she had said that for 
five years she had fretted under the Methodist 
doctrines and hymnology. Well, the least you 
can say about that is that it was considerable 
of a fret. Shakespeare's fretful porpentine 
could not show better results than that. And, 
with no reflection whatever upon the gracious 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 299 

and winsome spirits who make up the Uni- 
tarianism of America, you can say that the 
lady went to the right place. There will be 
nothing in their doctrines or hymnology to 
fret her; while anyone in the fretful way will 
find a good deal of irritating material in the 
doctrines and hymnology of the church that 
is built on the preaching of Christ as atonement. 
Its doctrines and hymns have blood in them; 
and they grate on sensitive spirits who enjoy 
the refinements of the Spoon River Anthology. 
There is death in these doctrines and hymns; 
and they are repulsive to delicate modern souls 
accustomed to the chaste spirituality of the 
newspapers and sex novels. But there are no 
doctrines and hymns which grip the heart and 
bring hope to broken souls and inspire courage 
in penitent and frightened folks, like these 
hymns and doctrines declaring a Christ who 
died for sin. Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin tells 
of a well-known British journalist who watched 
the Passion Play at Oberammergau, and came 
away saying to himself, "This is the story that 
has transformed the world," and afterward said 
that he seemed to hear an echo saying, "Yes, 
and will transform it." Bishop Butler, that 
mightiest intellect of modern theology, as he 
lay dying, spoke of his awe at appearing before 
God. In reply, his chaplain repeated the words, 



300 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

"The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us 
from all sin." 

"Ah," said the dying philosopher, "this is 
comfortable." 

It is that profound, ineffable fact that we are 
built on; and whatever may be the gracious 
example which Jesus affords, whatever may be 
the expanding social and personal ideals which 
he inspired and continues to sustain, they and 
he alike are utterly inadequate unless, before 
all else and deeper than all else, he is called 
Jesus because he saves his people from their 
sins. "First of all . . . Christ died for our sins." 

Furthermore, that is not all that the apostles 
and prophets preached. If it were, there might 
be justification for the statement of one of 
these modern interpreters to whom I have been 
referring, that we dare not give to Christ any 
"place except in his humanity while he lived 
on earth." Before him it was Matthew Arnold 
who phrased the same attitude: 

"Now he is dead; far hence he lies 

In the lorn Syrian town; 
And on his grave with shining eyes 
The Syrian stars look down." 

But neither of these students seems to have 
studied the New Testament. The New Testa- 
ment Christians would not have recognized 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 301 

any such theology. They preached a Christ 
who died; but not a Christ who stayed dead. 
They said that Christ died for our sins, but 
was "raised for our justification." "Ye, by 
the hand of lawless men, did crucify and slay," 
cries Peter, "whom God raised up." 

It is here, perhaps, as at no other point, 
that the Christian claim is attacked to-day, 
even in the house of its friends. For it is the 
doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus which, of 
all the fundamentals, is most questioned and 
modified. The curiosity bred of the scientific 
spirit has made us skeptical as never before, 
and recurrent explanations denaturing the 
record in the gospels are offered for our intel- 
lectual satisfaction. But there was no modify- 
ing of it by the apostles and prophets; they 
magnified it. They did not denature it, they 
demanded it in full. If there is any one factor 
in the Christian faith on which more than on 
another the New Testament Church rested its 
confidence and based its propaganda, it is the 
resurrection of Jesus. It was that which 
changed the disciples from disheartened and 
bewildered men into the spiritual masters of 
their day. It was that on which they not only 
based their preaching but sustained their mar- 
tyrdoms. "If Christ hath not been raised, then 
is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain. 



302 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; 
because we witnessed of God that he raised 
up Christ." That is Paul's preaching. His 
sober historical writing is after this fashion: 
"Christ died . . . and ... he was buried; and . . . 
hath been raised on the third day . . . and ap- 
peared to Cephas; then to the twelve; then he 
appeared to above five hundred brethren at 
once, . . . then he appeared to James; then to 
all the apostles; and last of all, . . . he appeared 
to me." I recall with a singular feeling a young 
minister who came to me at the close of a 
sermon I had delivered somewhere in South 
Dakota a few years ago during Lent. He re- 
minded me that Easter was coming and asked 
me for a good Easter text. Then he said that he 
wanted something novel ! This is the most novel 
thing in the world; it is amazing beyond im- 
agination. It was as amazing to the apostles, 
but they preached it, not because it was novel 
but because if Christ was not risen from the 
dead, the whole structure of their faith and 
experience was without foundation. If to-day 
Christ is not risen from the dead, our faith and 
Christian society and its institutions are built 
upon the most monstrous lie of all history. 

All this would seem surely to be foundation 
enough, a tradition sublime enough to sustain 
the noblest life and service of humanity down 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 303 

all the years; but there is one other element 
in the apostles' preaching. Christ, the incar- 
nation of God, who died for our sins and was 
raised for our justification, is not all the Christ 
they preached. What is he now and what is 
he doing? He is the source of spiritual power. 
"Christ shall give thee light." That is another 
of the things he is doing; he is the inspiration 
of life. "Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself 
. . . comfort your hearts and establish them in 
every word and work." That is another of the 
things he is doing; he is a personal reenforcement 
and the spring of our social activities. Christ is 
alive and gives life to our spiritual experience 
and enterprise. It is bitterly true that we 
haven't realized that to the limit of our priv- 
ilege. We say that Christ is alive; but his 
livingness is not the atmosphere in which we 
live. It is the atmosphere in which Dr. Grenfell 
of the Labrador lived. He was adrift on an 
ice floe, and had to kill three of his dogs that 
he might wrap himself in their skins. He made 
a flag-staff of the dead dogs' legs and waited 
hour after hour in the awful stillness for rescue 
that seemed unlikely, for death was right at 
hand, but his dominant experience was of the 
presence of the living Christ. Bishop Thoburn 
has testified again and again that in all the 
places and dangers in which, through half a 



304 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

century of world-wide missionary service, he 
found himself, the one certainty which possessed 
him was always the presence of the living 
Christ. Psychological critics may affirm that 
all this is but subjective feeling and has no 
place in the sober records of life, but it is the 
most real experience to which these sober men 
bear witness, and it runs back to the living 
Christ the prophets and apostles preached. 

But these New Testament preachers were 
not merely subjective; they declared the most 
subduing mystery of the faith, as an objective 
reality. Christ, they said, is not only strength- 
ening men, not only inspiring them, not only 
reenforcing their social activities; "He ever 
liveth to make intercession for us." That is 
beyond all our explanations. Commentaries 
may be ever so wise, but they only multiply 
words. The New Testament makes no com- 
ment; it thunders the stupendous fact. You 
may falter at the intellectual challenge in that 
declaration, but it seeks out your heart and 
your hopelessness and your sorrow and your 
sin and gives a light and a hope and a heaven 
and a heartening and a gladness, that nothing 
else in all the faith can give. I have heard a 
father praying for a girl whose sins had scarred 
his love, and that was a holy business. I have 
heard a mother praying for a wayward son 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 305 

whose sins had pierced her heart like a sword; 
and that was a divine and tragic plea. But 
here is the unfathomable passion of the Al- 
mighty, Christ ever living to make intercession 
for us. "Wherefore he is able to save to the utter- 
most them that draw near unto God by him." 

This is the Christ the apostles and prophets 
preached and knew; the Christ who abides; 
the "same yesterday, to-day, and forever." 
This is the sublime tradition on which we are 
built, the foundation "in whom each several 
building, fitly framed together, groweth into a 
holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are 
builded together for a habitation of God in 
the spirit." To those who realize that spiritual 
things are spiritually discerned there will come 
no fear for the faith, and for the church that 
incarnates it in social action. You will judge 
the strength of a structure not by the noise 
of the winds that roar around its gables but by 
the foundation on which it rests. You will 
judge the durability of the Christian faith 
and the Christian Church, not by the vehe- 
mence of the criticism which beats against them 
but by the depth of their entrenchment in the 
experience of humanity and the revealed life 
of God. We are not failing; we are fastened on 
a Rock. We are not crumbling; we are growing 
in a living structure whose roots are in the very 



306 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

springs of life. We are not shifting before the 
storm of sin and sordidness and skepticism, 
not even shaking in the shrilling winds of an 
expanding knowledge which for the time seems 
to ignore him. We are built upon the founda- 
tion, and our maker and builder is God. 

II 

Now, in saying all this I have committed the 
most glaring homiletical crime. I have dis- 
cussed theology. I have talked about what the 
magazine critics abhor as doctrines. But if the 
present situation in which the church and 
society find themselves has anything to teach 
us, it is that our social agencies, our educa- 
tional activities, our administrative develop- 
ments have had little permanent effect in the 
lives of men because they have not issued from 
intelligently apprehended Christian doctrine. 
We have inaugurated an attractive social min- 
istry, but we have not ministered to the durable 
faith of society. We have organized a splendid 
program of education but we have not edu- 
cated men in the things most surely to be 
lived. We have wrought out a most business- 
like administration of the church, but we have 
not administered grace to the glory of God. 
Nineteen centuries bear recurrent witness that 
the days of the church's noblest influence, the 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 307 

days of Christianity's most commanding and 
enduring expression in personal and social life, 
have been the days when its mighty doctrines 
were greatly preached and widely meditated. 
And the most insistent and important ques- 
tion for the Christians of to-day who are eager 
that the church shall take its full share in the 
responsibilities of this critical time, is not, as 
so many are asking, What shall we do? but, What 
shall we believe? and, On what shall we insist? 
This foundation of the apostles and prophets 
which I have been reviewing is the only intel- 
lectual foundation on which the church and 
any victorious Christian experience and any 
hope of a regenerated society, can be per- 
manently built. And that is a truth our day 
needs recognize anew; for we are in the midst 
of bold and subtle attempts to lay different 
foundations for the old structures. They are 
doomed to fail. "Other foundation can no 
man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus 
Christ." That is the voice, not alone of the 
New Testament, but of history as well. The 
noblest attempt that was ever made to build 
anew the church and faith upon something less 
than this was when the first great heresy shook 
the fourth century, and down the years of con- 
troversy the foundation of the apostles and 
prophets stood untrembling in the storm. The 



308 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

tragic worship of humanity with which the 
frenzied revolutionists of France thought to 
usher in their day of freedom still lies, like 
crumbled clay, beside this historic order they 
thought to supplant. The reasonable religion 
of Comte and George Eliot and Frederic Har- 
rison remains only in the pages of a few books; 
and you cannot think of it without remember- 
ing Henry Adams's remark concerning a ser- 
vice which he had attended, that he had been 
to church where there were three men present 
and no God. President Eliot's religion of the 
future, of which we heard a good deal a few 
years ago, has not come into the present yet; 
and of it one of the ablest intellects in America 
remarked that it was a dream of senility. 
Around us is the welter of curious discontented 
sects, promising much, fulfilling little, and 
fading one after another into the forgetfulness 
of the world. One by one they pass, one by 
one they will pass, or history has no meaning. 

"O where are kings and empires now, 
Of old that went and came? 
But, Lord, thy church is praying yet, 
A thousand years the same. 

"Unshaken as eternal hills, 
Immovable she stands, 
A mountain that shall fill the earth, 
A house not made with hands." 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 309 

And that is so, not because the church and the 
faith are forever readjusting themselves to the 
changing moods of hurrying generations — they 
are doing that and must continue to do so — 
but because they are built upon the changeless 
foundation, "Jesus Christ himself being the 
chief corner stone/' 

That phrase brings us back into more the- 
ology. The foundation which the apostles 
and prophets laid is the Christ they preached; 
the corner stone is the Christ personal. We 
are built, intellectually and socially, upon a 
sublime tradition; but the tradition is com- 
pleted and verified in a sublime experience. 
Christianity is a religion of a Book, but it 
is also the religion of a Personality. It is an 
inheritance from history, but it is also an en- 
duement of life. "It is no longer I that live, 
but Christ liveth in me." 

Mr. S. D. Gordon has told the story of a 
hard old sea captain, who, after the fashion of 
melodrama, found himself dying in his cabin. 
He sent for the mate and asked him, "Mate, 
can you tell a man how to die?" And the mate 
was so frightened that he bolted back to the 
deck and gave it out as his opinion that the 
old man had gone off his head. Then the cap- 
tain sent for the crew, one after another, and 
to each of them put the same question, "Can 



310 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

you tell a man how to die?" And every man, 
frightened and ignorant, shook his head and 
went back to the deck. At last only the cabin 
boy who helped the cook was left; and as a 
forlorn hope the captain sent for him and asked 
him, "Boy, can you tell a man how to die?" 

And the boy shook his head while the light 
of hope faded from the captain's eyes, and then 
he said, "No, but if my mother were here, I 
think she could." 

The light came back into the captain's eyes, 
and he asked, "Well, if your mother were here, 
what do you think she would do?" 

"I think she'd get the Bible." 

The captain motioned feebly to his chest 
beside his bunk and bade the boy open it and 
take out the Bible. After much rummaging the 
boy found it. 

"And what do you think your mother would 
do now?" the captain asked; and the boy an- 
swered, "I think she'd get the fifty -third chap- 
ter of Isaiah." 

"Well, then," said the captain, "you get it." 

I suppose that the boy was no more familiar 
with the Bible than the captain was, but the 
story tells that he found the fifty -third chapter 
of Isaiah and then said, "Captain, I think if 
my mother were here, she'd read a little and 
then have you repeat it." 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 311 

"All right," said the captain, "we'll do what 
you think your mother would do." 

So the boy read, "He was wounded for our 
transgressions," and the captain repeated, "He 
was wounded for our transgressions." 

The boy read, "The chastisement of our peace 
was upon him," and the captain repeated, "The 
chastisement of our peace was upon him." 

The boy read, "And with his stripes we are 
healed"; and the captain repeated, "And with 
his stripes we are healed." 

Then the captain asked, "What did your 
mother say it means there?" and the boy 
answered, "My mother said it was Jesus 
Christ." After a moment's pause he added, 
"Captain, my mother said you had to put your 
own name in here so as to make it sort o* 
personal." 

"All right," said the captain, "we'll do what- 
ever you think your mother 'd tell us to do." 
So they read it again, the boy first, and the 
captain repeating it: 

"He was wounded for Captain Smith's trans- 
gressions." — "He was wounded for Captain 
Smith's transgressions.", 

"He was bruised for Captain Smith's in- 
iquities." — "He was bruised for Captain Smith's 
iniquities." 

"The chastisement of Captain Smith's peace 



312 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

was upon him." — "The chastisement of Cap- 
tain Smith's peace was upon him." 

"And with his stripes Captain Smith is 
healed." — But the Captain did not repeat that. 
He said, "And with his stripes I am healed." 

He had made it personal. We are built, not 
only on the Christ preached, but on the Christ 
personal. 

You may miscall that mysticism; but it is a 
very intelligible business. It is the experience 
of men and women of all times and circum- 
stances since Christendom. Martin Luther 
understood it. "If any man should rap on my 
breast," he said, "and ask, 'Does Martin Luther 
live here?' I should answer, 'Not Martin Luther, 
but Jesus Christ.' ' John Bunyan understood 
it. The Wesleys, with their witness of the 
Spirit, understood it; and so did the host of 
humbler, sober folks who found in more thought- 
ful days the quieter and more personal experi- 
ence of spiritual things. Our generation has 
not been interpreting religion in this fashion. 
The prose and practicalness of science, the 
almost inevitable worldliness of our social 
enthusiasms, the revolt of the modern mind 
from the older language of religion, all have 
gone to make it barren and almost waste of 
that older, richer inner life. But even now I 
dare believe the tides of that older mysticism 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 313 

are rising to roll in once more upon our day. 
The Christ of history and the Christ of criticism 
and the Christ of our happy social ideal are 
not enough; and the wistful hearts of men and 
women a-plenty are homing back to the Christ 
of intimate and personal experience. 

That is not to say that the old forms and ex- 
pressions of experience are returning. It was 
communion then; it is Lordship now. Then 
saints meditated on Him till a flood of feeling 
warmed their very souls; now they obey Him, 
and find their fervor rising, restrained but real, 
as they do His will. "Ye are my friends if ye 
do the things which I command you." Then 
they were ecstatic; and their standard of re- 
ligious appraisal was their sense of the inner 
life; now they are practical; and their measure 
of value is the constraint of a new loyalty. 
But whether you call it old or new mysticism, 
or whatever you call it, it is the experience of 
the personal Christ driving life out into the 
spiritual conquest of the world. It is but an 
appeal to observation and experience to say 
that such experience and such a loyalty cannot 
be produced with any lesser origin than Christ, 
Divine, Redeemer, Risen, Interceding, whom 
the apostles preached. It is an experience and 
a loyalty which, for all the fervor of the social 
mood, is not evoked by Jesus the social reformer; 



314 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

with all the benedictive influences of the ethnic 
faiths, it cannot be derived from Jesus the 
spiritual teacher; with all the mild passion of 
refined selfishness, it is not possible with the 
Jesus of Science and Health. This experience 
and loyalty which transform life in terms of 
holiness and power rise only from this founda- 
tion of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ 
himself being the chief corner stone. 

And this personal Christ solves the three great 
questions of sincere individual life: First, the 
question of doubt. Some time ago I heard a 
young woman in college saying that Jesus 
Christ had settled all the doubts that had 
almost killed her since her mother died. It was 
a very simple statement, but it involves a 
great deal. She had gone through the deeper 
problems with which humanity has been be- 
wildered since its beginnings: love and death, 
prayer and sorrow, God and suffering. And 
the doubts had been settled, not by a creed 
but by Christ, not by a new illumination of 
the intellect but by a new direction of the life, 
not by a clarified mind but by a constrained 
affection, not by more accurate knowledge but 
by a more intimate experience. It may all seem 
to spring from an intellectual affirmation, but it 
is, deeper than intelligence, the Personal Christ. 
Browning put it into three memorable lines: 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 315 

"I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by the reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it." 

But Browning has not captured the entire and 
subtler truth; Jesus declared eighteen centuries 
earlier: "If any man will do his will, he shall 
know of the teaching." Immediately comes 
Paul with his gigantic declaration that "neither 
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 
nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
creature, shall be able to separate us from the 
love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 
If such language means anything for life other 
than rhetoric, it means that we are not to 
understand Christ; we are to obey him. We 
are not to philosophize about him; we are to 
do what he says. We may not understand 
whom we have believed, but we will know him, 
and when we live all that we would like to 
believe, then we shall discover that it is not 
we who live but Christ liveth in us. Our curi- 
osity may not be satisfied but our hearts will 
be fixed; and while our intellects may question 
they will not complain, for he will keep us in 
perfect peace because our minds will be stayed 
on him. 

This settles, also, the question of duty. Christ 
Personal, in a mysterious but real way, is 



316 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

Christ propulsive. We are permitted to dis- 
cover not only what we are but what we are 
to do. There is nothing more sure in the life 
of the Spirit than that Christ directs not only 
character but conduct; and that, not simply in 
isolated alternatives, but in the general respon- 
sibilities of life. "Christ," a young college 
man wrote me a long time ago, "settles the 
life work question." Strange as the process may 
seem to be, it is not an appeal to the spectacular 
nor a presumption of miracle. But no man can 
surrender his life to the compulsion of a living 
Christ, and seek honestly to discern and do 
Christ's will, and not in time have impressions 
crystallize to convictions, talents disclose per- 
haps unsuspected powers, the vision of need 
around him reveal his own necessity, and his 
opportunities take form as personal obligations. 
All that could be illustrated at length; but we 
can do without illustrations in this instance 
and rest the case on these old and amazing 
words of Jesus, "When he, the Spirit of truth, 
is come, he shall guide you into all the truth." 
That must include truth of action as well as 
of apprehension. "He shall glorify me: for he 
shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto 

you." 

And finally — for the sermon (there is no 
finally for Christ) — the Personal Christ an- 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 317 

swers the question of destiny. He not only com- 
mands the present; he guarantees the future. 
I read Socrates's arguments for immortality, 
and see him dying with a fortitude which saints 
might covet; but his arguments make no im- 
pression on us nowadays. The whole vast 
expectation of another life which haunts or 
sustains the scattered tribes of men offers 
hope, but it may be, after all, mistaken. Go 
further: read Saint Paul's majestic confidence 
that the Lord himself shall descend, and you 
cannot escape the sense of insecurity because 
the old Ptolemaic conception of the earth 
which Paul holds makes his descriptions fanci- 
ful. Acknowledge the beauty of the visions 
of Saint John, those glorious metaphors of the 
city with the streets of gold and gates of pearl 
and the sea of glass and fire where the un- 
wearied multitudes of the redeemed sing for- 
ever of the victory of the Lamb, and God amid 
the splendors of an endless day wipes all 
tears away from tired eyes, — the visions wake 
within us the music of ineffable desire. But 
nobody knows! Nobody knows! They expect 
and argue and portray and claim — but nobody 
knows! And then the Personal Christ makes 
his immemorial appeal, and the reality of the 
living Christ speaks home to the heart, and the 
record that he left finds its vindication in the 



318 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

experience of his presence, — and Somebody 
knows! He knows! "In my Father's house 
are many mansions. If it were not so, I would 
have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." 
He knew then. But he is not only historic; 
he is personal. He knows now. 

We are built on the foundation of the apos- 
tles and prophets; and that is a stupendous 
heritage. But Jesus Christ himself is the chief 
corner stone, and that is an eternal life. We 
are built on a sublime tradition, but the tradi- 
tion is sustained by a sublime experience. 
We are built on the Christ preached, but we 
are secured by the Christ personal. 

I stood one night upon the deck of a two- 
hundred-ton schooner scudding across the wind 
that blew from off the Atlantic and roused the 
waters of a North Carolina sound into a swirl 
of rolling billows. Overhead the clouds were 
tumbling in great clots of threatening black, 
and from them flashed the long, fierce lightning 
that lighted the sound and shore in vivid 
gleams. In those flashes we could see the 
spray of billows breaking hard upon the nar- 
row barrier between us and the wide Atlantic, 
and through the inlet we caught dim sight of 
the storming ocean as it thundered terribly 
upon the beach. The clouds grew heavier, 
and then the rain beat down; the schooner 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 319 

leaped like a frightened horse; and round her 
bows the water roared as we drove before the 
wind. The captain was at the wheel, oilskins 
from head to foot; the rigging creaked and the 
wet sails strained to the whining sheets. "I'm 
a-tellin' you she's goin' to be a sockdolager," 
he shouted; and then he looked around and 
said, "If you stand up on the house there you 
can see Hatter as." And I stood on the house 
there and faced the driving wind and rain, and 
then vaguely, then more clearly, then dim again, 
as the gusts darkened like shifting veils between 
us and the shore, I saw the yellow glare of the 
Cape Hatteras light, around which, just beyond 
the thin barrier of rock and sand, the angry ocean 
battered in increasing fury. I'm a-telling you 
she was a sockdolager! As we drove down 
before the storm the captain beguiled the night 
with tales of the terrible sea; of the wrecks 
around the cape; tales of brave ships broken on 
the reef, of men and boys and dear, dead 
women lost in the storms and nights of years 
before; and he pictured the wrecks, and named 
them, and told of sailors he had known, long 
since drowned there in the unnumbered trage- 
dies that have made Hatteras the graveyard of 
the sea. O, it was a cheerful hour, with the 
storm rocking us and the ship straining, and 
the captain wrestling with the wheel, and the 



320 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 

seamen shifting the tackle in the storm! It 
was hilarious to a couple of landsmen to hear 
about the wrecks and dead folks around the 
reef we had just passed ! But the night slipped 
away and when the morning came we were 
safe enough in the land-locked sound. Out 
upon the coast, however, there was another 
story; a story of ships driven and broken by 
the gale; a story of deep-set piers torn and 
twisted like the playthings of a child, of great 
hotels up shore, wrecked by the waves that 
broke all bounds. For the sea had come 
thundering in from its unfathomed deeps and 
the tides had risen like consuming furies and 
hurled themselves on pier and shop and 
house, and had flung themselves on Hatteras 
light even as we had watched, and the light- 
house had swung to and fro. But it stood; 
and the light did not so much as flicker in the 
storm; and when the tempest died away, 
Hatteras light looked out serenely over wreck 
and ruin and the sullen, murderous but defeated 
sea, unmoved, unbent, unshaken. For its 
mighty pile was built, rooted, riveted, in the 
very rock itself; and all the continent was 
underneath. 

Our abiding certainty is like that — we are 
built! The tradition and the experience! the 
faith and the life! the gospel and Christ! Amid 



IMPREGNABLE TRADITION 321 

the storm of social passion, of industrial dis- 
cord, of international hate, of critical hostility, 
amid the tumult of immeasurable war and the 
lashing disillusionment of its continuing bit- 
terness, while tawdry and cheap beliefs that 
promised easily a new peace are crumbling to 
the sands; while the social institutions, the 
speculative systems, which men have made are 
shaking to their disintegration under the beat of 
an irresistible reality — amid it all this founda- 
tion holds! On it the church is built impreg- 
nable, and from it our lives are set to grow 
into the holy temple of the Lord. That is a 
confidence we need never question. That 
means a society regenerate because it is a hu- 
manity redeemed. That means the satisfac- 
tion of intelligence by the enrichment of ex- 
perience. That means the establishment of 
our faith by the adventure of our fidelity. 
That means that we can be sure of what is to 
come because of the Lord who is already here; 
till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and 
of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a 
full-grown man, unto the measure of the 
stature of the fullness of Christ. 




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